The impact of advances in computer technology on particle transport Monte Carlo

Advances in computer technology, including hardware, architectural, and software advances, have led to dramatic gains in computer performance over the past decade. We summarize these performance trends and discuss the extent to which particle transport Monte Carlo codes have been able to take advantage of these performance gains. We consider MIMD, SIMD, and parallel distributed computer configurations for particle transport Monte Carlo applications. Some specific experience with vectorization and parallelization of production Monte Carlo codes is included. The topic of parallel random number generation is discussed in some detail. Finally, some software issues that hinder the implementation of Monte Carlo methods on parallel processors are addressed.