Parallel Monte Carlo Synthetic Acceleration methods for discrete transport problems

This work researches and develops Monte Carlo Synthetic Acceleration (MCSA) methods as a new class of solution techniques for discrete neutron transport and fluid flow problems. Monte Carlo Synthetic Acceleration methods use a traditional Monte Carlo process to approximate the solution to the discrete problem as a means of accelerating traditional fixed-point methods. To apply these methods to neutronics and fluid flow and determine the feasibility of these methods on modern hardware, three complementary research and development exercises are performed. First, solutions to the SPN discretization of the linear Boltzmann neutron transport equation are obtained using MCSA with a difficult criticality calculation for a light water reactor fuel assembly used as the driving problem. To enable MCSA as a solution technique a group of modern preconditioning strategies are researched. MCSA when compared to conventional Krylov methods demonstrated improved iterative performance over GMRES by converging in fewer iterations when using the same preconditioning. Second, solutions to the compressible Navier-Stokes equations were obtained by developing the Forward-Automated Newton-MCSA (FANM) method for nonlinear systems based on Newton's method. Three difficult fluid benchmark problems in both convective and driven flow regimes were used to drive the research and development of the method. For 8 out of 12 benchmark cases, it was found that FANM had better iterative performance than the Newton-Krylov method by converging the nonlinear residual in fewer linear solver iterations with the same preconditioning. Third, a new domain decomposed algorithm to parallelize MCSA aimed at leveraging leadership-class computing facilities was developed by utilizing parallel strategies from the radiation transport community. The new algorithm utilizes the Multiple-Set Overlapping-Domain strategy in an attempt to reduce parallel overhead and add a natural element of replication to the algorithm. It was found that for the current implementation of MCSA, both weak and strong scaling improved on that observed for production implementations of Krylov methods.