Shared memory parallelism for 3D Cartesian discrete ordinates solver

This paper describes the design and the performance of DOMINO, a 3D Cartesian SN solver that implements two nested levels of parallelism (multicore + SIMD) on shared memory computation nodes. DOMINO is written in C++, a multi-paradigm programming language that enables the use of powerful and generic parallel programming tools such as Intel TBB and Eigen. These two libraries allow us to combine multi-thread parallelism with vector operations in an efficient and yet portable way. As a result, DOMINO can exploit the full power of modern multi-core processors and is able to tackle very large simulations, that usually require large HPC clusters, using a single computing node. For example, DOMINO solves a 3D full core PWR eigenvalue problem involving 26 energy groups, 288 angular directions (S16), 46×106 spatial cells and 1×1012 DoFs within 11 h on a single 32-core SMP node. This represents a sustained performance of 235 GFlops and 40.74% of the SMP node peak performance for the DOMINO sweep implementation. The very high Flops/Watt ratio of DOMINO makes it a very interesting building block for a future many-nodes nuclear simulation tool.