Issue |
EPJ Web Conf.
Volume 251, 2021
25th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP 2021)
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | 03037 | |
Number of page(s) | 12 | |
Section | Offline Computing | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/202125103037 | |
Published online | 23 August 2021 |
https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/202125103037
GPU simulation with Opticks: The future of optical simulations for LZ
1 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA 94720-8099, USA
2 Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 19B Yuquan Road, Shijingshan District, Beijing, Postal code: 100049, China
3 University of Bristol, H.H. Wills Physics Laboratory, Bristol, BS8 1TL, UK
4 SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Menlo Park, CA 94025-7015, USA
5 Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-4085 USA
6 Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 31 Fitzwilliam Place, D02 XF86 Dublin 2, Ireland
* e-mail: creanero@gmail.com
Published online: 23 August 2021
The LZ collaboration aims to directly detect dark matter by using a liquid xenon Time Projection Chamber (TPC). In order to probe the dark matter signal, observed signals are compared with simulations that model the detector response. The most computationally expensive aspect of these simulations is the propagation of photons in the detector’s sensitive volume. For this reason, we propose to offload photon propagation modelling to the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), by integrating Opticks into the LZ simulations workflow. Opticks is a system which maps Geant4 geometry and photon generation steps to NVIDIA’s OptiX GPU raytracing framework. This paradigm shift could simultaneously achieve a massive speed-up and an increase in accuracy for LZ simulations. By using the technique of containerization through Shifter, we will produce a portable system to harness the NERSC supercomputing facilities, including the forthcoming Perlmutter supercomputer, and enable the GPU processing to handle different detector configurations. Prior experience with using Opticks to simulate JUNO indicates the potential for speed-up factors over 1000× for LZ, and by extension other experiments requiring photon propagation simulations.
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2021
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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