GPU in Physics Computation: Case Geant4 Navigation

Understand

General purpose computing on graphic processing units (GPU) is a potential method of speeding up scientific computation with low cost and high energy efficiency.

• We experimented with the particle physics simulation toolkit Geant4 used at CERN to benchmark its geometry navigation functionality on a GPU.
• The goal was to find out whether Geant4 physics simulations could benefit from GPU acceleration and how difficult it is to modify Geant4 code to run in a GPU.
• We ported selected parts of Geant4 code to C99 & CUDA and implemented a simple gamma physics simulation utilizing this code to measure efficiency.