Speaker
Description
The McStas[1-3] Monte Carlo ray-tracing package for neutron instrument simulations was founded at RISØ in Denmark in 1997. For more than 25 years it has served the neutron scattering community as a stable workhorse for design and optimisation of novel neutron optical systems and has in the later years become an important enabler within the area of virtual experiments.
McStas runs on all major operating systems from laptop-scale to hpc clusters, on CPUs and Nvidia GPUs[4].
Where possible, McStas links with established standard software e.g. material-properties via NCrystal[5] and Sasmodels[6] and particle-list exchange via MCPL[7].
The presentation will cover recent developments in the McStas project, including a more streamlined mechanism for contribution of user developed components/instrument models as well as a progress report from our ongoing GPU benchmarking/optimisation efforts. We will describe our work to enable support for the nearing ESS hot-commissioning phase.
References:
[1] K. Lefmann and K. Nielsen, "McStas, a General Software Package for Neutron Ray-tracing Simulations", Neutron News 10, 20, (1999)
[2] P. Willendrup, and K. Lefmann, Journal of Neutron Research, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 1-16, 2020 https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-neutron-research/jnr190108
[3] P. Willendrup, and K. Lefmann, Journal of Neutron Research, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 7-27, 2021 https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-neutron-research/jnr200186
[4] Speeding up legacy: GPU-accelerating the McStas instrument simulation code using OpenACC (ICNS 2022) - https://youtu.be/Ou7dAHhJRn0?si=BayBGbG0RR-RVt2i
[5] X.-X. Cai, T. Kittelmann, "NCrystal: A library for thermal neutron transport”, Computer Physics Communications, 246, (2020) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpc.2019.07.015.
[6] Sasmodels is the SasView model library, see https://github.com/SasView/sasmodels
[7] T. Kittelmann, E. Klinkby, E. B. Knudsen, P. Willendrup, X. X. Cai, K. Kanaki, Monte Carlo Particle Lists: MCPL http://inspirehep.net/record/1486049