SUMMARY

In this thesis, the parallel performance of the finite element-spherical harmonics (FE-PN) method implemented in the general-purpose radiation transport code EVENT is studied both analytically and empirically. EVENT solves the coupled set of space-angle discretized equations using a parallel block-Jacobi domain decomposition method. As part of the analytical study, the thesis presents complexity results for EVENT when solving for a 3D benchmark radiation transport problem in parallel. The empirical analysis is concerned with the impact of the main factors affecting performance. Firstly, EVENT supports two solution strategies, namely MOD (Moments Over Domains) and DOM (Domains Over Moments), to solve the transport equation in parallel. The two strategies differ in the way they solve the multi-level space-angle coupled systems of equations. The thesis presents empirical evidence of which of the two solution strategies is more efficient. Secondly, different preconditioners are used in the Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient (PCG) inside EVENT. Performance of EVENT is compared when using two preconditioners, namely diagonal and ILU. The other two factors, angular and spatial resolutions of the problem affect both the performance and precision of EVENT. The thesis presents comparative results on EVENT’s performance as these two resolutions are increased. From the empirical performance study of EVENT, a bottleneck is identified that limits the improvement in performance as number of processors used by EVENT is increased. In some experiments, it is observed that uneven assignment of computational load among processors causes a significant portion of the total time being spent in synchronization among processors. The thesis presents two indicators that identify when such inefficiency occur; and in such case, a load rebalancing strategy is applied that computes a new partition of the problem so that each partition corresponds to equal amount of computational load.