RESEARCH

Monte Carlo method is widely used technique which uses repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results. This method can be used to solve neutron transport equation in reactor physics simulations. This method has significant advantage in simulating neutrons in continuous phase space involving energy, angle and space. It also has advantage in the flexibility of geometry treatment. Explicit modelling of complex structures such as CANDU fuel bundle or experimental reactor is possible with Monte Carlo method. There have been severe efforts to apply Monte Carlo method to realistic core calculations. SNURPL also developed continuous energy Monte Carlo code PRAGMA which is specialized for power reactor analysis.

Though Monte Carlo method has certain advantages, a significant amount of stochastic samples are required to produce statistically reliable results due to its probabilistic nature. The excessive computational burden associated with using large samples prevents the use of the Monte Carlo method in practical reactor core calculations. To alleviate heavy computational burden of Monte Carlo method, there was various approaches to apply massive parallelization. PRAGMA uses GPUs to achieve high computing performance and showed promising performance.