Abstract The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a cubic kilometer neutrino detector located at the geographic South Pole designed to detect high-energy astrophysical neutrinos. To thoroughly understand the detected neutrinos and their properties, the detector response to signal and background has to be modeled using Monte Carlo techniques. An integral part of these studies are the optical properties of the ice the observatory is built into. The simulated propagation of individual photons from particles produced by neutrino interactions in the ice can be greatly accelerated using graphics processing units (GPUs). In this paper, we (a collaboration between NVIDIA and IceCube) reduced the propagation time per photon by a factor of up to 3 on the same GPU. We achieved this by porting the OpenCL parts of the program to CUDA and optimizing the performance. This involved careful analysis and multiple changes to the algorithm. We also ported the code to NVIDIA OptiX to handle the collision detection. The hand-tuned CUDA algorithm turned out to be faster than OptiX. It exploits detector geometry and only a small fraction of photons ever travel close to one of the detectors.

Hendrik Schwanekamp

Ramona Hohl

Dmitry Chirkin

Tom Gibbs

Alexander Harnisch

Claudio Kopper

Peter Messmer

Vishal Mehta

Alexander Olivas

Benedikt Riedel

Martin Rongen

David Schultz

Jakob van Santen

Computing and Software for Big Science

Accelerating IceCube’s Photon Propagation Code with CUDA

使用CUDA加速IceCube的光子传播代码

Accelerating IceCube’s Photon Propagation Code with CUDA

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