Parallel Performance of the Time Dependent Transport Code TDKENO with Applications to TREAT Simulations

Renewed interest in high fidelity simulation of excursion events has prompted the improvement of codes that solve the time-dependent Boltzmann transport equation. Often these codes make approximations to the transport equation in order to achieve results in a reasonable amount of time. One method, the improved quasi-static (IQS), makes few approximations compared to adiabatic, diffusion, and point kinetics. This is the methodology employed by the code TDKENO. One downside to this approach is a portion of the calculation (flux shape) is done with a Monte Carlo code and must be called upon several times. To minimize run time the flux shape calculation is solved with a modified version of KENO-VI from Scale 6.2. This version of KENO runs in parallel across hundreds of nodes, thus improving performance. The parallel capabilities of KENO allows TDKENO to simulate complex transient experiments with a large number of histories. These improvements are applied to the simulation of TREAT calibration experiments. (authors)