An Improved GPU-based Ray-shooting Code for Gravitational Microlensing

Abstract

We present an improved inverse-ray-shooting code based on graphics processing units (GPUs) to generate microlensing magnification maps. In addition to introducing GPUs to accelerate the calculations, we also invest effort into two aspects: (i) A standard circular lens plane is replaced by a rectangular one to reduce the number of unnecessary lenses as a result of an extremely prolate rectangular image plane. (ii) An interpolation method is applied in our implementation, achieving significant acceleration when dealing with the large number of lenses and light rays required by high-resolution maps. With these applications, we have greatly reduced the running time while maintaining high accuracy: The speed was increased by about 100 times compared with an ordinary GPU-based inverse-ray-shooting code and a GPU-D code when handling a large number of lenses. If a high-resolution situation with up to 10,0002 pixels, resulting in almost 1011 light rays, is encountered, the running time can also be reduced by two orders of magnitude.