ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2026
Jan 2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
May 2026
Nuclear Technology
February 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
DTRA’s advancements in nuclear and radiological detection
A new, more complex nuclear age has begun. Echoing the tensions of the Cold War amid rapidly evolving nuclear and radiological threats, preparedness in the modern age is a contest of scientific innovation. The Research and Development Directorate (RD) at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) is charged with winning this contest.
Jie Liu, Lihua Chi, Wang QingLin, Gong Chunye, Jiang Jie, Gan Xinbiao, Li Shengguo, Qingfeng Hu, Tom Masterson
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 184 | Number 4 | December 2016 | Pages 527-536
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE15-53
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Sweep scheduling methods used in particle transport problems belong to the class of precedence-constrained scheduling problems that are NP-complete. It is difficult to schedule local tasks for this type of transport problem and simultaneously optimize computational performance and parallel processor communication. In this paper, we present a parallel spatial-domain-decomposition algorithm to divide the tasks among the available processors. We also present a new algorithm for scheduling tasks within each processor. The scheduling algorithm has the required data and does not need to communicate with any other processor. This algorithm optimizes and assigns task priorities within the processor. Computational tasks whose results are required by another processor receive the highest priority. We combined these two algorithms to solve two-dimensional particle transport equations on unstructured grids. Our results show good performance and scalability up to 16 384 processors on the TianHe-2 supercomputer.