Geant 4 on GPUs

by Dhruva for CERN SFT

Radiation transport simulations find use in a variety of applications, especially in the fields of particle physics and in medicine for calculation of doses in radiation therapy. I propose the implementation of a radiation transport algorithm with the Geant4 toolkit using Graphics Processing Units (GPU). GPUs are highly parallel SIMD chips which have been shown to give speedups of several orders of magnitude in many applications. The most accurate method, namely the Monte Carlo method for simulation can greatly benefit from the use of a GPU implementation in terms of speed or number of events simulated. I will write macros for certain parts of Geant4 to allow for the simulation of Gamma particles on a GPU. I will also compare this new parallel implementation with the existing one in terms of speedup, accuracy and try to address potential bottlenecks.