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Accelerating IceCube's Photon Propagation Code with CUDA

Benedikt Riedel · CERN

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About

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 3. 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..

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The talk

  1. Accelerating IceCube's Photon Propagation Code with CUDA 2021-05-19 · 28 min · CERN's player

Credits and licence

Institution
CERN
Department
Conferences
Speaker
Benedikt Riedel
Year
2021
Language
English
Subjects
Physics, Computer science, Earth and environment
Source
CERN
Licence
CERN, as CERN states it. CERN's terms
Attribution
© CERN. CERN provides its audiovisual media free of charge for educational and informational use, credited to CERN; this lecture is shown in CERN's own player.
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