GPU Accelerated Simulation of Channeling Radiation of Relativistic Particles

TL;DR

This paper presents a GPU-accelerated simulation tool for modeling the radiation emitted by relativistic particles in crystals, significantly speeding up calculations and enabling broader research access.

Contribution

The authors developed a CUDA/C++ code that efficiently simulates channeling radiation, incorporating quantum effects, scattering, and energy loss, with performance surpassing traditional CPU clusters.

Findings

GPU acceleration achieves several orders of magnitude speedup.

One Titan V GPU can replace up to 100 CPU cores.

The code accurately reproduces experimental radiation spectra.

Abstract

In this paper we describe and demonstrate a C++ code written to determine the trajectory of particles traversing oriented single crystals and a CUDA code written to evaluate the radiation spectra from charged particles with arbitrary trajectories. The CUDA/C++ code can evaluate both classical and quantum mechanical radiation spectra for spin 0 and 1/2 particles. We include multiple Coulomb scattering and energy loss due to radiation emission which produces radiation spectra in agreement with experimental spectra for both positrons and electrons. We also demonstrate how GPUs can be used to speed up calculations by several orders of magnitude. This will allow research groups with limited funding or sparse access to super computers to do numerical calculations as if it were a super computer. We show that one Titan V GPU can replace up to 100 Xeon 36 core CPUs running in parallel. We also show that choosing a GPU for a specific job will have great impact on the performance, as some GPUs have better double precision performance than others.