  The multigroup neutron transport equations has been widely used to study the
interactions of neutrons with their background materials in nuclear reactors.
High-resolution simulations of the multigroup neutron transport equations using
modern supercomputers require the development of scalable parallel solving
techniques. In this paper, we study a scalable transport method for solving the
algebraic system arising from the discretization of the multigroup neutron
transport equations. The proposed transport method consists of a fully coupled
Newton solver for the generalized eigenvalue problems and GMRES together with a
novel multilevel domain decomposition preconditioner for the Jacobian system.
The multilevel preconditioner has been successfully used for many problems, but
the construction of coarse spaces for certain problems, especially for
unstructured mesh problems, is expensive and often unscalable. We introduce a
new subspace-based coarsening algorithm to address this issue by exploring the
structure of the matrix in the discretized version of the neutron transport
problems. We numerically demonstrate that the proposed transport method is
highly scalable with more than 10,000 processor cores for the 3D C5G7 benchmark
problem on unstructured meshes with billions of unknowns. Compared with the
traditional multilevel domain decomposition method, the new approach equipped
with the subspace-based coarsening algorithm is much faster on the construction
of coarse spaces.
