Development of neutron transport simulation processes on FPGA-based hardware accelerators for fourth-generation nuclear power plants

The aim of this thesis is to re-examine the computational models currently used in neutron diffusion simulations in uranium-boron materials in order to optimise their computational performance. It is well known that open source simulation framework such as OpenMC require high computational performance because they typically simulate the diffusion of thousands of particles, with variable initial energy, within materials of known composition. Descriptive and simulation software systems are typically designed with high-level abstraction languages such as Python and C++. Despite their descriptive versatility, these languages are not optimised in terms of computational efficiency and, for this reason, require increasingly high computational performance for their execution, such as that obtained through large High Performance Computing centres. My personal contribution to this thesis reproduces neutron diffusion simulations using high-level description algorithms implemented on commercial hardware platforms. This work was carried out using firmware design codes, applying and exploiting the intrinsic parallelism of FPGA devices, thereby accelerating calculation times by approximately two orders of magnitude.