LAUSR

Abstract In order to improve the prediction of atmospheric dispersion of radionuclides (ADR) in vicinity of Central Nuclear Almirante Alvaro Alberto (CNAAA) Brazilian Nuclear Power Plants (NPP), a more refined computational system is under development. To achieve desired refinement, the required computational effort increases in such a way that system's execution by current computers leads to prohibitive processing time. Aiming to accelerate execution of such refined system, allowing its effective use in real-time prediction of ADR, a GPU-based parallel approach has been proposed. Basically, the ADR system used in CNAAA is comprised by 4 main modules (programs): Source Term, Wind Field, Plume Dispersion and Plume Projection modules. This work is focused on the Wind Field module, which uses a mass-consistent approach, based on Winds Extrapolated from Stability and Terrain (WEST) model. Due to the strong sequential nature of the algorithm, domain decomposition by a 3D-Red-Black partitioning was proposed and a new parallel GPU-based algorithm was implemented using the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) and C programming language. As a result, the execution time of a fine-grained simulation decreased from about 450 s (running on an Intel-I7) to 18 s (running on a GTX-680 GPU). Here, the most important issues of the parallel implementation, as well as comparative results, are presented and discussed.