2023/09/21 by Adam C. Davis, Sacha Barré, Davis, Adam C. S. +11
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Optical Sensing Technologies #Computational Physics (physics.comp-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2309.12496
openalex publication_date 2023/09/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Optical photon propagation is an embarrassingly parallel operation, well suited to acceleration on GPU devices. Rendering of images employs similar techniques -- for this reason, a pipeline to offload optical photon propagation from Geant4 to the industry-standard open-source renderer Mitsuba3 has been devised. With the creation of a dedicated plugin for single point multi-source emission, we find a photon propagation rate of 2×105 photons per second per CPU thread using LLVM and 1.2×106 photons per second per GPU using CUDA. This represents a speed-up of 70 on CPU and 400 on GPU over Geant4 and is competitive with other similar applications. The potential for further applications is discussed.