Nonlinear acceleration of SN transport calculations
Erin D. Fichtl, James S. Warsa, Matthew T. Calef · OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) · 2010
The use of nonlinear iterative methods, Jacobian-Free Newton-Krylov (JFNK) in particular, for solving eigenvalue problems in transport applications has recently become an active subject of research. While JFNK has been shown to be effective for k-eigenvalue problems, there are a number of input parameters that impact computational efficiency, making it difficult to implement efficiently in a production code using a single set of default parameters. We show that different selections for the forcing parameter in particular can lead to large variations in the amount of computational work for a given problem. In contrast, we present a nonlinear subspace method that sits outside and effectively accelerates nonlinear iterations of a given form and requires only a single input parameter, the subspace size. It is shown to consistently and significantly reduce the amount of computational work when applied to fixed-point iteration, and this combination of methods is shown to be more efficient than JFNK for our application.