Gerald: a general environment for radiation analysis and design

Full text of publication follows: This paper describes the status of the GERALD interactive workbench for the analysis of radiation transport problems. GERALD basically guides the user through the various steps that are necessary to solve a radiation transport problem, and is aimed at education, research and industry. The advantages of such workbench are many: quality assurance of problem setup, interaction of the user with problem solution, preservation of theory and legacy research codes, and rapid proto-typing and testing of new methods. The environment is of general applicability catering for analytical, deterministic and stochastic analysis of the radiation problem and is not tied to one specific solution method or code. However, GERALD is being developed as a portable, modular, open source framework which renders itself quite naturally to the coupling of existing computational tools through specifically developed plug-ins. By offering a common route for setting up, solving and analyzing radiation transport problems GERALD offers the possibility of methods intercomparison and validation. Such flexible radiation transport environment will also facilitate the coupling of radiation physics methods to other physical phenomena and their application to other areas of application such as medical physics and the environment. (authors)