Performance of an Optical TPC Geant4 Simulation with Opticks GPU-Accelerated Photon Propagation

TL;DR

This paper compares the performance of Opticks, a GPU-accelerated photon propagation tool, with traditional Geant4 simulations, demonstrating significant speed improvements while maintaining accurate photon detection results.

Contribution

It provides a detailed performance comparison showing that Opticks significantly accelerates photon propagation simulations compared to CPU-based Geant4, with consistent photon detection results.

Findings

Opticks achieves 58 to 181 times faster simulation speeds.

Photon detection results are consistent between Opticks and Geant4.

Performance varies depending on GPU and CPU types.

Abstract

We investigate the performance of Opticks, a NVIDIA OptiX API 7.5 GPU-accelerated photon propagation tool compared with a single-threaded Geant4 simulation. We compare the simulations using an improved model of the NEXT-CRAB-0 gaseous time projection chamber. Performance results suggest that Opticks improves simulation speeds by between 58.47+/-0.02 and 181.39+/-0.28 times relative to a CPU-only Geant4 simulation and these results vary between different types of GPU and CPU. A detailed comparison shows that the number of detected photons, along with their times and wavelengths, are in good agreement between Opticks and Geant4.