Comparisons of dosimetric accuracy and calculation time of ARCHER and MCNP5 codes for the Ir-192 brachytherapy case - Paper 1
In the last decade, the graphics processing unit (GPU) technology has emerged as a viable player in high-performance computing. A GPU card is designed to carry out thousands of single instructions simultaneously, showing unprecedented computing power when compared with the traditional CPU technology. It has been proved that some computationally intensive programs can be accelerated drastically on the GPUs including Monte Carlo simulations. Unfortunately, existing production Monte Carlo codes cannot be easily ported to the GPU environment. To address the needs, a new Monte Carlo code ARCHER (Accelerated Radiation-transport Computations in Heterogeneous Environment) is being developed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, employing the latest GPU and the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor technologies. We can execute the code which was written using C and C++ on both CPU and GPU platforms. The ARCHER GPU code was written in CUDA C 5.0 and was tested on the Tesla M2090. There have been a few studies testing the ARCHER GPU code on several different platforms. In particular, Su et al has tested the ARCHER for external-beam radiation treatment 20 MeV monoenergetic monodirectional parallel electron beam. The comparison of the calculation results between EGSnrc and ARCHERGPU was impressive. A remarkable 224- fold speed-up factor was obtained using a NVIDIA Tesla M2090 GPU compared to a CPU. In this study, we applied the ARCHER code to dose calculation for a relatively new procedure, called accelerated partial breast irradiation (APBI) brachytherapy. The APBI brachytherapy dose calculation was based on RPI-AF phantom which is a 3D heterogeneous patient model. We then compared the dosimetric accuracy and calculation times of ARCHER and MCNP5 to gain insight into the accuracy and speedup of the GPU-based ARCHER code. (authors)