JULIA for enhancing nuclear engineering simulations (JENES): introduction to the JENES project and platform

Nuclear engineering education and research and development depend strongly on computer soft- ware and can stagnate if there is a large gap between theory and implementation. For this reason, we introduce a computational framework and platform to incorporate state-of-the-art coding paradigms and computer programs into nuclear engineering simulations. Since a computer code is characterized (first and foremost) by its programming language, we test a modern programming language called JULIA for its viability in nuclear engineering simulations and for the required state-of-the-art paradigm intended. JULIA is considered a Just-Ahead-Of-Time (JAOT) programming language that has elements of both Just-In-Time (JIT) and Ahead-Of-Time (AOT) compiled languages. JULIA has dedicated open-source modern mathematics, plotting, pre/post processing, machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), automatic differentiation (AD) and optimization libraries that can be oriented together in tandem towards systematic computing. To compare JULIA's capabilities against Fortran and MATLAB, we transferred a Nodal Expansion Method (NEM) code directly from Fortran to both JULIA and MATLAB and tested their computation speed using the IAEA-3D steady-state reactor simulation benchmark. The preliminary results show that the compiled JULIA code indeed has comparable speed to the Fortran version. We also demonstrated data plotting and pre/post processing using the JULIA code showing its edge in such tasks, leading to the possibility of both closed- and open-sourced complete nuclear engineering platform. (authors)