GMC: a GPU implementation of a Monte Carlo dose calculation based on Geant4

Abstract

We present a GPU implementation called GMC (GPU Monte Carlo) of the low energy (<100 GeV) electromagnetic part of the Geant4 Monte Carlo code using the NVIDIA® CUDA programming interface. The classes for electron and photon interactions as well as a new parallel particle transport engine were implemented. The way a particle is processed is not in a history by history manner but rather by an interaction by interaction method. Every history is divided into steps that are then calculated in parallel by different kernels. The geometry package is currently limited to voxelized geometries. A modified parallel Mersenne twister was used to generate random numbers and a random number repetition method on the GPU was introduced. All phantom results showed a very good agreement between GPU and CPU simulation with gamma indices of >97.5% for a 2%/2 mm gamma criteria. The mean acceleration on one GTX 580 for all cases compared to Geant4 on one CPU core was 4860. The mean number of histories per millisecond on the GPU for all cases was 658 leading to a total simulation time for one intensity-modulated radiation therapy dose distribution of 349 s. In conclusion, Geant4-based Monte Carlo dose calculations were significantly accelerated on the GPU.