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August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
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The deadline arrives: Checking in on the Reactor Pilot Program
On May 23, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14301, “Reforming Nuclear Reactor Testing at the DOE,” which instructed the Department of Energy to create a Reactor Pilot Program (RPP)—a new system in which companies could pursue DOE authorization to build and test their first-of-a-kind nuclear technologies. EO 14301 set an ambitious goal for that program: three reactors achieving criticality by July 4, 2026.
Tianyu Liu, Noah Wolfe, Christopher D. Carothers, Wei Ji, X. George Xu
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 185 | Number 1 | January 2017 | Pages 232-242
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE16-33
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
XSBench is a proxy application used to study the performance of nuclear macroscopic cross-section data construction, which is usually the most time-consuming process in Monte Carlo neutron transport simulations. In this technical note we report on our experience in optimizing XSBench to Intel multicore central processing units (CPUs), many integrated core coprocessors (MICs), and Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs). The continuous-energy cross-section construction in the Monte Carlo simulation of the Hoogenboom-Martin large problem is used in our benchmark. We demonstrate that through several tuning techniques, particularly data prefetch, the performance of XSBench on each platform can be desirably improved compared to the original implementation on the same platform. It is shown that the performance gain is 1.46× on the Westmere CPU, 1.51× on the Haswell CPU, 2.25× on the Knights Corner (KNC) MIC, and 5.98× on the Kepler GPU. The comparison across different platforms shows that when using the high-end Haswell CPU as the baseline, the KNC MIC is 1.63× faster while the high-end Kepler GPU is 2.20× faster.