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Division Spotlight
Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Latest News
Glass strategy: Hanford’s enhanced waste glass program
The mission of the Department of Energy’s Office of River Protection (ORP) is to complete the safe cleanup of waste resulting from decades of nuclear weapons development. One of the most technologically challenging responsibilities is the safe disposition of approximately 56 million gallons of radioactive waste historically stored in 177 tanks at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
ORP has a clear incentive to reduce the overall mission duration and cost. One pathway is to develop and deploy innovative technical solutions that can advance baseline flow sheets toward higher efficiency operations while reducing identified risks without compromising safety. Vitrification is the baseline process that will convert both high-level and low-level radioactive waste at Hanford into a stable glass waste form for long-term storage and disposal.
Although vitrification is a mature technology, there are key areas where technology can further reduce operational risks, advance baseline processes to maximize waste throughput, and provide the underpinning to enhance operational flexibility; all steps in reducing mission duration and cost.
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.
