Multi-threading performance of Geant4, MCNP6, and PHITS Monte Carlo codes for tetrahedral-mesh geometry.

Multi-threading performance of Geant4, MCNP6, and PHITS Monte Carlo codes for tetrahedral-mesh geometry.
Phys Med Biol. 2018 Apr 10;:
Authors: Han MC, Yeom YS, Lee HS, Shin B, Kim CH, Furuta T
Abstract
In the present study, the multi-threading performances of the Geant4, MCNP6, and PHITS codes were evaluated as a function of the number of the threads (N) and the complexity of the tetrahedral-mesh phantom. For this, three tetrahedral-mesh phantoms with different complexity (simple, moderately complex, and highly complex) were prepared and implemented in three different Monte Carlo codes, carrying out photon and neutron transport simulations. Subsequently, for each case, the initialization time, calculation time, and memory usage were measured as a function of the number of threads used in the simulation. It was found that for all codes, the initialization time significantly increases with the complexity of the phantom, but not much with the number of the threads. Geant4 showed much longer initialization time than the other codes, especially for the complex phantom (MRCP). In the present study, the improvement of the computation speed due to the use of a multi-threaded code was calculated as a speed-up factor, which is the ratio of the computation speed on a multi-threaded code to the computation speed on the single-threaded code. Geant4 showed the best multi-threading performance among the codes considered in this study, with the spee...

Source: Physics in Medicine and Biology - April 10, 2018 Category: Physics Authors: Han MC, Yeom YS, Lee HS, Shin B, Kim CH, Furuta T Tags: Phys Med Biol Source Type: research