Abstract and subjects
•A fast Monte Carlo based radiation transport code ARCHER was developed.•ARCHER supports different hardware including CPU, GPU and Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor.•Code is benchmarked again MCNP for medical applications.•A typical CT scan dose simulation only takes 6.8s on an NVIDIA M2090 GPU.•GPU and coprocessor-based codes are 5–8times faster than the CPU-based codes.
The Monte Carlo radiation transport community faces a number of challenges associated with peta- and exa-scale computing systems that rely increasingly on heterogeneous architectures involving hardware accelerators such as GPUs and Xeon Phi coprocessors. Existing Monte Carlo codes and methods must be strategically upgraded to meet emerging hardware and software needs. In this paper, we describe the development of a software, called ARCHER (Accelerated Radiation-transport Computations in Heterogeneous EnviRonments), which is designed as a versatile testbed for future Monte Carlo codes. Preliminary results from five projects in nuclear engineering and medical physics are presented.