GPU-Accelerated Monte Carlo Electron Transport Methods: Development and Application for Radiation Dose Calculations Using Six GPU cards

Nuclear Engineering Program, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY 12180, USA

^* Corresponding Author, E-mail: xug2@rpi.edu

Abstract

An electron-photon coupled Monte Carlo code ARCHER ─ Accelerated Radiation-transport Computations in Heterogeneous EnviRonments ─ is being developed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as a software testbed for emerging heterogeneous high performance computers that utilize accelerators such as GPUs. This paper presents the preliminary code development and the testing involving radiation dose related problems. In particular, the paper discusses the electron transport simulations using the class-II condensed history method. The considered electron energy ranges from a few hundreds of keV to 30 MeV. For photon part, photoelectric effect, Compton scattering and pair production were modeled. Voxelized geometry was supported. A serial CPU code was first written in C++. The code was then transplanted to the GPU using the CUDA C 5.0 standards. The hardware involved a desktop PC with an Intel Xeon X5660 CPU and six NVIDIA Tesla™ M2090 GPUs. The code was tested for a case of 20 MeV electron beam incident perpendicularly on a water-aluminum-water phantom. The depth and later dose profiles were found to agree with results obtained from well tested MC codes. Using six GPU cards, 6x106 electron histories were simulated within 2 seconds. In comparison, the same case running the EGSnrc and MCNPX codes required 1645 seconds and 9213 seconds, respectively. On-going work continues to test the code for different medical applications such as radiotherapy and brachytherapy.