Oregon State Engineering Faculty Public Lecture: Todd Palmer
| During the Manhattan Project, physicists and mathematicians were driven to understand and predict the complex behavior of neutrons undergoing chain reactions as they built the first nuclear reactors and, subsequently, the first atomic weapons. Along the way, analog and digital computers were developed to automate many of the calculations associated with the transport and interaction of radiation with matter. Since the mid-1940s, both the fields of nuclear engineering and computer science have experienced exponential advances. Computers are ubiquitous and integrated into nearly every aspect of our daily lives, but the transcomputable nature of radiation transport still inspires the development of ever larger and more powerful computers.
This lecture will introduce the Monte Carlo method and its early applications to neutron transport. After briefly tracing the algorithmic, hardware, and software advancements that have occurred in the past 75 years, the lecture will discuss the progress being made in the Center for Exascale Monte Carlo Neutron Transport (CEMeNT) toward highly performant time-dependent neutron transport simulations on the largest supercomputers available today and in the future. |