Meeting the challenge of JUNO simulation with Opticks: GPU optical photon acceleration via NVIDIA® OptiX^TM

Institute of High Energy Physics, CAS, Beijing, China.

^* Corresponding author and speaker on behalf of the JUNO collaboration. e-mail: simon.c.blyth@gmail.com.

Published online: 16 November 2020

Abstract

Opticks is an open source project that accelerates optical photon simulation by integrating NVIDIA GPU ray tracing, accessed via NVIDIA OptiX, with Geant4 toolkit based simulations. A single NVIDIA Turing architecture GPU has been measured to provide optical photon simulation speedup factors exceeding 1500 times single threaded Geant4 with a full JUNO analytic GPU geometry automatically translated from the Geant4 geometry. Optical physics processes of scattering, absorption, scintillator reemission and boundary processes are implemented within CUDA OptiX programs based on the Geant4 implementations. Wavelength-dependent material and surface properties as well as inverse cumulative distribution functions for reemission are interleaved into GPU textures providing fast interpolated property lookup or wavelength generation. Major recent developments enable Opticks to benefit from ray trace dedicated RT cores available in NVIDIA RTX series GPUs. Results of extensive validation tests are presented.