On the MCNP Forum and its Community

What this episode is about

The presentation discusses the MCNP community and its forum, detailing the history and evolution of MCNP releases over the past 20 to 25 years. It emphasizes the importance of community engagement in understanding the code’s use, highlights contributions from key individuals, and reviews the user base and interactions within the current discourse forum.

Key takeaways

• MCMP's evolution shows that even code has a 'coming of age'—from paper to pixels in just 40 years!
• The pandemic didn’t just disrupt life; it catalyzed MCMP's user base growth, proving necessity is the mother of adaptation.
• With 73% of releases going to the US, MCMP is a homegrown hero—global ambition with a local heart!
• From archaic e-notebooks to sleek discourse forums, MCMP's communication evolution is a tech timeline worth a TED Talk.
• Only 32% of MCMP users hailed from other countries; imagine the untapped potential just waiting for the next newsletter!

Who speaks in this episode?

• Joel Kaza (Host) · 18 min speaking
• Mark Bear (Guest)
• Tim Valentine (Guest)
• Fred Jones (Guest)

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 3:00: MCMP, Discourse, Joel Kaza, MCNP
2. 3:00 – 6:00: Arsich, MCNP, MCMP website, COVID-19 pandemic
3. 6:00 – 9:00: Discourse, Fred Jones, MCMP website
4. 9:00 – 12:00: Discourse
5. 12:00 – 15:00: Discourse

Notable quotes from "On the MCNP Forum and its Community"

• Before I begin, I'd like to acknowledge the contributions to this talk by Tim Valentine, Arsich for providing the MCNP license distribution details for roughly the last 20 to 25 years, as well as Fred.

  about Joel Kaza · at 0:19

• Historically, that community has gathered on the MCMP forum. Of course, we're now in our fifth annual MCMP user symposium, but the record of that, somewhat like the last…

  about MCMP user symposium · at 1:42

• And we see here in August 1983 the release of the MCNP code and computer package CCC 200 that releases the MCP code that preceded it.

  about MCNP · at 3:19

• I suppose as a bar chart race where we can see the evolution of those releases over time. The data shown here are for the various versions as recorded by Arsich and we get a…

  about Arsich · at 4:25

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Joel Kaza — Person · Main speaker · 1 mention · first at 0:01
  Delivers the recorded talk about the MCMP formats community and forum history, speaking on behalf of himself and Mark Bear.
• Fred Jones — Person · Referenced contributor / forum administrator · 2 mentions · first at 0:28
  Credited for deploying and overseeing the Discourse-based MCMP forum and for communicating the email-forum shutdown notice.
  Valentine, Arsich for providing the MCNP license distribution details for roughly the last 20 to 25 years, as well as Fred Jones here on the MCMP team at Los Alamos National…
• Arsich — Person · Referenced contributor / records source · 3 mentions · first at 0:23
  Credited with providing MCNP license distribution details over ~20–25 years; also cited as the source of version/distribution records used in the talk.
• Chief Thunder Bear — Person · Co-presenter (referenced) · 1 mention · first at 0:14
  Named as the co-presenter/representative with Joel Kaza for the talk being delivered to Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
  Record and present this video while I'm on leave. I'm happy to bring you this talk on the MCMP formats community on behalf of myself and Mark Bear to Oakidge National Laboratory.
• Tim Valentine — Person · Referenced contributor · 1 mention · first at 0:21
  Acknowledged as a contributor to the talk content, though specific contributions are not detailed.
  Before I begin, I'd like to acknowledge the contributions to this talk by Tim Valentine, Arsich for providing the MCNP license distribution details for roughly the last 20 to 25 years, as well as Fred.

Companies & orgs

• MCMP website — Company · Resource · 2 mentions · first at 3:04
  Online platform hosting resources and information for the MCMP community.
  At the end of this talk and the PDF rendition that we'll have hosted on the MCMP website, there's a reference collection with the many talks that are cited down below in the brackets. These.

Products & tech

• MCNP — Product · Business focus · 2 mentions · first at 1:21
  Primary software product discussed in the podcast, with detailed analysis of its distribution and community engagement.
• MCMP — Product · Business focus · 3 mentions · first at 0:13
  Variant or related version of MCNP, discussed in the context of community forums and user engagement.
  Record and present this video while I'm on leave. I'm happy to bring you this talk on the MCMP formats community on behalf of myself and Mark Bear to Oakidge National Laboratory.
• Discourse — Product · Case study · 10 mentions · first at 0:35
  Software platform used for the current iteration of the MCMP forum, analyzed for its features and user engagement metrics.
  In advance of that shutdown, the discourse-based forum was rolled out, which is now the current iteration of the forum that I encourage you to participate in if you aren't already on.

Places & events

• MCMP user symposium — Event · Event · 1 mention · first at 1:46
  Annual gathering for the MCMP community, discussed as part of the community engagement efforts.
• COVID-19 pandemic — Event · Referenced event · 1 mention · first at 5:07
  Mentioned as a factor influencing the adoption of MCMP62 by users during lockdowns.
  Top of this chart we don't dwell on it further. What's interesting with that MCNP62 climb to dominance may be a function of its release before the CO 19 pandemic when a number…

Full transcript with timestamps

0:01 Hello everybody. My name is Joel Kaza and I'm sorry I can't be with you there today. However, I'd like to thank the symposium organizers for allowing me to record and present this video while I'm on leave. I'm happy to bring you this talk on the MCMP formats community on behalf of myself and Mark Bear to Oakidge National Laboratory. Before I begin, I'd like to acknowledge the contributions to this talk by Tim Valentine, Arsich for providing the MCNP license distribution details for roughly the last 20 to 25 years, as well as Fred Jones here on the MCMP team at Los Alamos National Laboratory for his work to deploy and oversee the discourse MCMP forum, which is the current form of the forum itself.

0:42 So, the breakdown of this talk is as follows. First, a little bit of background and motivation for why we're having this presentation in the first place. And then we'll look at some detail at those last 20 to 25 years of MCMP releases. As the community has gathered around this code to understand how to best use it, it's important to understand how the code has come into the hands of those members of the MCMP community. Then there will be a brief review of the different epochs or generations of the MCMP forum. And then finally a more detailed look at the use of the discourse forum by its user base as well as the con constitution of that user base.

1:21 So the first MCMP public release was made in 1983 and we only have statistics though for the last 20 to 25 years in a condensed form that's easy to parse and present data on. So that's what we'll primarily be looking at. However, as we understand the community that forms around the code, I think this will help us with that. Now, historically, that community has gathered on the MCMP forum. Of course, we're now in our fifth annual MCMP user symposium, but the record of that, somewhat like the last generation of the forum, is somewhat ephemeral. We have a recording of the different talks in the MCNP reference collection at mcnp.lannel.gov.

2:01 But in terms of understanding that community, there's not a concise record which this talk is hoping to resolve. But again looking back at the membership of the form to understand that subset of the MCMP user community that has joined together to communicate on it, we have these three epochs from roughly 1999 to 2010. There were the so-called arson e notebooks. Scarce records exist on that but we will see a brief glimpse into what the interface for that looked like. Then we have the email-based forum which many of us may be familiar with. It was alive for about the last 20 years and was shut down last September 2024.

2:40 In advance of that shutdown, the discourse-based forum was rolled out, which is now the current iteration of the forum that I encourage you to participate in if you aren't already on there. As we think about those RSI releases, it's important to understand the timing. And I found that one of the key ways to understand the timing of those releases is actually through the ars newsletters. At the end of this talk and the PDF rendition that we'll have hosted on the MCMP website, there's a reference collection with the many talks that are cited down below in the brackets. These arc newsletters record and provide us a consistent way to date those releases.

3:19 And we see here in August 1983 the release of the MCNP code and computer package CCC 200 that releases the MCP code that preceded it. So now looking across those last 25 years, we've chosen 1999 as the start point. We see a little bit of release just before the start of this graph because we do have some time that predates that from 1994. However, 1999 is chosen to correspond with the start of that RSC e notebook forum. So all of our plots are on roughly the same time scale. But what we can see are a variety of these releases. The shading is not significant. It merely alternates to allow one to more easily pick out those releases. I think it is interesting to see the bump in distribution rate after certain release releases such as 5.1.40 40 and 6 beta 3 6.1 and then certainly most recently after version 6.3 in 2023.

4:23 What we have here though is what's known I suppose as a bar chart race where we can see the evolution of those releases over time. The data shown here are for the various versions as recorded by Arsich and we get a sense of timing and how the code has evolved in its version and adoption by the user community over those last 20 or so years. Now the more generically named MCNCX at the top does have some additional qualifiers after it but because of its short standing at the top of this chart we don't dwell on it further. What's interesting with that MCNP62 climb to dominance may be a function of its release before the CO 19 pandemic when a number of folks in the community adopted it to explore as a function of being at home during that pandemic.

5:11 Now, as we look at releases to different country members, roughly 73% of releases are made to US citizens. If we look at that remaining proportion, we can see the top countries distributed to here. And perhaps what's most remarkable is in the 32 or so percent of the other category, we have roughly 74 other countries represented. So as now we think about that global user base for the MCMP code, what do the different epochs of that form look like? First, we have a retrieval of the RSI e- notebook entry interface. The URL is given there in the web browser. This is still available at arsich.orl.gov.

5:54 However, as you try to click into the forum, it is unavailable. We can see some broken graphic links, but it's a uh somewhat dated perhaps design calling for Explorer 4 or Netscape 408. But really the important thing to note here is the presence of these e- notebooks and really the forward thinking at the time that these were developed and deployed to start writing down what the users of the MCMP code and the community wrapped around it are doing with each other. We have the quote at the bottom by Ivan Buunan with that forwardinking thought that if we don't write something down we will lose it.

6:34 As time went by, there is movement from that e-notebook interface to an emailbased interface. And so here, of course, is just an email inbox looking at that collection of forum postings with that September 25th, 2024 note from Fred, noting that the Discourse forum would be taking over and that this email forum would be uh discontinued. However, at the time that that forum was discontinued, we had 1,827 members. There was an advantage with email and that the approach is almost bulletproof. Almost everybody by the point that this was rolled out and certainly by the time this was discontinued had access to email. It was an easy way to exchange information, provide attachments like input files or images of plots that questions could center themselves around. However, there was the weakness that the email form was ephemeral. We did not record and redistribute information on the email forum. So folks who are joining it for

7:34 the first time would have no real history of what came before them. Of course, for those who are longtime members of the forum, this was no big deal. But for folks new to the MCMP community, this did cause a challenge. And what we began to observe was a number of perennial questions that would come up. Some of those would be recorded and captured in the frequently asked questions of the MCMP website, but some were common enough but still nuanced enough that was not appropriate to make a short reply to some of those common inquiries.

8:06 Recognizing that shortcoming, several years ago, we be began exploring alternatives to the email-based forum. And the alternative identified as the preferred alternative is based on the discourse collaboration software. Here we see a look inside the forum. We can organize information by categories. And so rather than attaching tags or some other way of filtering those emails, we have a trivial way to understand the nature of the different kinds of posts and for members new and old alike to go find those posts that are most relevant to them. There's also a search capability that will look across the breadth of the forum to allow someone to easily retrieve that information that came before. And perhaps most notably, there is access to that information that came before. Even if you join today, you have access to that prior information and the discussion that evolved around it along the various threads. So the

9:00 view we're showing here are those categories. You can approach it by clicking all the categories in the lefth hand sidebar or at the top there is indicated by the arrows. Another view which is the one that I tend to use is the topical view which is from all of the categories. and we'll see a dateordered indication of the different threads in the activity. We have that last visit indicator with that red arrow so that as we perhaps haven't visited in a while, we can see the nature of the discussion that took place in our absence. We also get a snapshot into the different participants of those conversations, seeing their avatar, the number of views and activity to understand those conversations that have drawn the most interest. And then in addition in this interface we see those different tags and so forth on the left.

9:48 And we can see some of that indicated here. For example, that topmost entry is affiliated with the installation tag. And so this gives us a good snapshot into the nature of these discussions. Now I and a number of members of the MCMP development team have administrative privileges to this forum and so there's some aspects that wouldn't be as apparent to folks who are just coming to this as a general member. For example, we have that uh post periodic boundary conditions 2 with a little i with a slash through it. That is something that was hidden because it ended up being a duplicative post of the one several above it. We also have the admin wrench in that lefth hand sidebar.

10:29 And so I'd like to give a bit of a peak behind the curtain to what that admin interface looks like. So when we click on that admin wrench, we get a lot of information on a discourse, which is also what makes it somewhat appealing relative to that email-based forum. We have greater insight into our community, how it's communicating with each other, the activity, and so forth. So for example, we have this aggregated site traffic information, which gives us a monthly view of daybyday activity of folks who are logged in interacting with the MCMP forum. We also have that frequency of signups, topics created, posts made, daily average users over maximum average users, daily engage users, new contributors, and so forth. So, we have really a broad view here of the health of our forum from an activity standpoint as the forum has grown.

11:22 If we scroll down, there's some more quantitative metrics, not just the visual ones we saw before, but understanding today, yesterday, the last week, and last month, how these different sorts of metrics have evolved, how many likes and flags we've seen to understand the health of the forum, how many people are contributing meaningfully versus perhaps somewhat negatively, as well as topics and search terms just to understand the hot things on folks minds that may help draw attention to areas of particular interest. We can also see a brief snapshot in the number of users here. So the users per trust level the administrative staff will tend to be in the 2 to four range whereas uh typical members of the community will be in that 0ero to one range really differentiated by when they've joined and how active they've been.

12:11 In addition to those aggregated results there's a number of reports available from discourse. So for example we see the number of emails sent. we can understand the traffic that we're generating in our members inbox. Daily engaged users flags again to understand are there particular users or sentiments that are maybe negatively affecting the community and so forth. Down below on this page, there's also a posts report which is what we're going to use and a few of the others to understand some of the plots we'll be seeing in a little bit where what we can do is typically look back a month and understand the dayby-day activity. For example, here the number of posts made. But we can change that date range over on the right to look over the effective full history of the discourse forum to create some of the time series data that we have to come.

13:02 Before we jump into the discourse forum though, a little bit more on those three epochs. As we look back, the statistics tend to get uh more obscure and harder to parse as time goes by. But we have been able to get information on the post frequency from all three of those epochs. So starting here we have the arsic notebooks again in the 1990 time 1999 time frame. We see a sudden spike between 2004 and 2009. I will admit this is what the data are showing. This doesn't seem to make a great deal of sense to me. But perhaps more meaningfully, if we draw a straight line across the extent in time and from min to max and posts, we can see that the activity on this arson e- notebookbased forum was roughly 1.3 posts per day. If we compare that with the roughly steady growth of the MCMP email-based forum, we can see it taking over in that 2005 time frame up until it was terminated last year in September. And drawing a similar

14:02 straight line through the min and max extents in X and Y, we can see the activity there was roughly 2.5 posts per day or just about double what we had previously. So seeing this increased adoption is of course exciting. Now looking at the relatively short history of the discourse forum, we see similarly roughly linear activity and drawing a similar line, we see roughly 4.7 posts per day. So again, it's exciting to see the membership of the forum over time being more active and engaged with the forum despite the change in technology over the life of it.

14:39 Finally, we have a cumulative view that shows that we've had nearly 25,000 posts over the lifetime of these three different forums and of course we look forward to more to come. There's a number of plots here now strictly focused on the discourse forum. We can see the eb and flow of week work weeks and week ends. We can also see the holiday time period there in the 2024 2025 changeover. But we can see that we're peing out roughly 50 to 70 visits per day by members of the forum. So there's a fair amount of consistent activity as we've seen this over time.

15:19 Now, if we look at maximum daily engaged users, some of our users are evidently quite active and revisit the forum multiple times per day. So, we're ste still seeing roughly equivalent or comparable participation dayto-day, more at the 10 user level. Now, this may seem small, but stand by till we talk about posts. Before we get to that though, an exciting metric are the number of new contributors. as we have folks joining the forum over time, we're seeing those folks emboldened to participate in it for the first time. So even though we look back over the last year, even over the last month or so, we're still seeing people join and participate for the first time. And so to me, this is a key metric of how welcoming the forum is to new members and how actively and effectively we can engage with them.

16:10 And then this is as I promised the posts. As we look over time, we're seeing 10 to 20 posts per day. So those folks visiting are participating and having good exchange with each other. With respect to the growth in membership, if we look back to that late June 2024 time frame, we see a nonzero number of members. Of course that was the MCMP development team who are engaged in early testing and understanding of the forum to see whether it was the right technology to adopt or not. We see a dramatic rise after it was introduced to the world.

16:45 And then if we look over the last half year or so and draw a trend line, we're seeing roughly one new member per day requesting to join. Now at that rate, we do appreciate the patience of those looking to join. We'll have a couple remarks on how to provide us all the information needed to make sure that we can process those join requests as effectively as possible, but it's exciting to see this stable growth as folks are accumulating in. And we can see that we're at roughly a thousand users as of the recording of this video.

17:15 When we look at the composition of those users, we can see a pretty broad breakdown here.net.biz. I'll say generally commercial entities make up a roughly a third of our membership. Roughly a third is.gov either lannel.gov okridge.gov and so forth. And then roughly a quarter of the membership are affiliated with other top level domains. So as we assess this membership, it's really based on the end of that email address that they provide. And so those national top level domains are something something like.co.uk UK to represent the United Kingdom. If we dive into roughly that quarter of the membership, we can see a breakdown of the various countries represented there.

17:59 We can see that there's 41 countries represented across a variety of the licenses that are distributed to permit membership into the forum. So, for example, folks who have the cloud license might join to still understand this information exchange so they can make sure that they're using that cloud-based MCMP installation to its fullest capability. Now, with respect to joining, if you're not joining, we would encourage you to join. Perhaps the easiest way to do that is to go to mcnp.land.gov/forum where you'll find information on what's needed to join. Most importantly, and what generally delays folks and has us come back to them with more information, please provide your full name, first and last name, and please provide your email address that's affiliate affiliated with the organization to which you are licensed to use the MCMP code. If you can provide that information, we can perform a quick lookup and get you

18:57 validated and fully in the forum. So, with that, again, I'd like to thank everybody for their time and attention. I apologize again that I can't be there. I have put my contact information in that upper corner. If you'd like to record it, I'd be happy to respond to any inquiries as soon as possible. I'll go ahead and let this video linger on for a few minutes while that gets recorded and say goodbye and see you soon. Thank you again.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "On the MCNP Forum and its Community"?

Joel Kaza (Host), Mark Bear (Guest), Tim Valentine (Guest), Fred Jones (Guest).

What is "On the MCNP Forum and its Community" about?

The presentation discusses the MCNP community and its forum, detailing the history and evolution of MCNP releases over the past 20 to 25 years. It emphasizes the importance of community engagement in understanding the code’s use, highlights contributions from key individuals, and reviews the user base and interactions within the current discourse forum.

What is mentioned in this Los Alamos National Laboratory episode?

11 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including MCNP, Joel Kaza, MCMP, Fred Jones, Discourse, Arsich. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "On the MCNP Forum and its Community"?

The episode runs 20 min; the transcript is about 3,333 words in 26 timestamped sections.

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