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. 2012 Dec 1;3(12):3223-30.
doi: 10.1364/BOE.3.003223. Epub 2012 Nov 12.

Accelerating mesh-based Monte Carlo method on modern CPU architectures

Qianqian Fang  1 , David R Kaeli
Affiliations

Accelerating mesh-based Monte Carlo method on modern CPU architectures

Qianqian Fang et al. Biomed Opt Express. .

Abstract

In this report, we discuss the use of contemporary ray-tracing techniques to accelerate 3D mesh-based Monte Carlo photon transport simulations. Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) based computation and branch-less design are exploited to accelerate ray-tetrahedron intersection tests and yield a 2-fold speed-up for ray-tracing calculations on a multi-core CPU. As part of this work, we have also studied SIMD-accelerated random number generators and math functions. The combination of these techniques achieved an overall improvement of 22% in simulation speed as compared to using a non-SIMD implementation. We applied this new method to analyze a complex numerical phantom and both the phantom data and the improved code are available as open-source software at http://mcx.sourceforge.net/mmc/.

Keywords: (170.3660) Light propagation in tissues; (170.5280) Photon migration; (170.7050) Turbid media.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Subroutine-level profiling for mesh-based MC simulation (a) without SSE, (b) with Havel & Herout’s SSE-based algorithm, and (c) with additional SSE-enabled math library and RNG. The area and percentage in each block represent the run-time for each subroutine normalized by the total run-time of case (a). If a block is enclosed by another, its percentage contributes to that of the enclosing block. Profiling is performed within a single thread.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
A tetrahedral mesh generated from the Digimouse atlas. Different colors represent different tissue types.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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