Technical Note: Radiotherapy dose calculations using GEANT4 and the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how cloud computing resources, specifically Amazon EC2, can be effectively used to perform Monte Carlo radiotherapy dose calculations with GEANT4, reducing costs and potentially speeding up simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a method for using Amazon EC2 and S3 to perform Monte Carlo radiotherapy dose calculations with GEANT4 in the cloud, highlighting cost savings and efficiency.

Findings

Spot market bidding reduces costs by 35-60%.

Cloud-based simulations are feasible for rapid radiotherapy dose calculations.

Demonstrates potential for scalable, cost-effective Monte Carlo simulations.

Abstract

Cloud computing allows for vast computational resources to be leveraged quickly and easily in bursts as and when required. Using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and the Amazon Simple Storage Solution, we describe a technique that allows for Monte Carlo radiotherapy dose calculations to be performed using GEANT4 and executed in the cloud. Simulation cost and completion time was evaluated as a function of instance count using compute instances acquired via biding on the Elastic Compute Cloud spot market. Bidding for instances on the instance spot market was found to be 35-60% of the cost of on-demand instances of the same type. Using the technique, we demonstrate the potential usefulness of cloud computing as a solution for rapid Monte Carlo simulation for radiotherapy dose calculation.