Flexible and Scalable Moment Method Simulations for Radiation Transport and Nuclear Medicine Applications

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This project develops computational methods and software tools to enable faster and more robust simulations of radiation transport, as well as the visualization of simulation results via virtual reality. Radiation transport and the transport of charged particles are central processes in many important complex systems, and they are crucial to incorporate in simulations for nuclear reactors, nuclear medicine, plasma, astrophysics, nuclear waste storage planning, and climate models. A particular application in this project is radiotherapy in cancer treatment. Novel computational approaches that facilitate optimal treatment planning in nuclear medicine will be produced in the form of publicly available software.This project builds and extends the open-source StaRMAP software through: (A) fundamental numerical analysis research, including new moment closures that combine simplicity with robustness, and efficient time-stepping approaches that automatically yield effective steady state radiation solvers in the diffusion limit; (B) high-performance computing research, by casting StaRMAP into a stencil code framework to obtain highly scalable 3D radiation solvers on high performance computing clusters; (C) interactions with new cyberinfrastructure, by coupling the software with virtual reality visualization; and (D) application research, by extending the StaRMAP code to nuclear medicine simulations, particularly radiotherapy with charged particles. The research is augmented and facilitated by community-building efforts around the StaRMAP project and training for students at the interface of computing, simulation, and virtual reality.This project is supported by the MPS/DMS/CDS&E-MSS program and by the CISE/OAC program.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.