Business Issues

Radiation particle packages are written largely by physicists without formal backgrounds in computer science. Learning the intricacies of distributed computing and applying it to a project increases the time of development and may compromise the correctness of that project. More specifically, the business issues surrounding the parallelization of radiation transport packages are as follows:

• Parallel training increases project times.
• Parallel computation is not germain to many package developers fields and can be viewed as a waste of resources.
• Efficiency and correctness of parallelization requires experience and knowledge of architectures that many radiation transport developers lack.
• Currently, each developer is approaching the parallelization problem differently. The absence of a common structure makes this class of code difficult to maintain.
• Current parallelization techniques used are not conducive to future changes, such as:
  • increased scalability
  • load balancing
  • optimization techniques
• Current parallelizations are not abstracted from the code to support adaption to new parallelization technology.