A graphics processor-based intranuclear cascade and evaporation simulation

Abstract

Monte Carlo simulations of the transport of protons in human tissue have been deployed on graphics processing units (GPUs) with impressive results. To provide a more complete treatment of non-elastic nuclear interactions in these simulations, we developed a fast intranuclear cascade-evaporation simulation for the GPU. This can be used to model non-elastic proton collisions on any therapeutically relevant nuclei at incident energies between 20 and 250 MeV. Predictions are in good agreement with Geant4.9.6p2. It takes approximately 2 s to calculate $1\times 10^6$ 200 MeV proton-$^{16}$O interactions on a NVIDIA GTX680 GPU. A speed-up factor of $\sim$20 relative to one Intel i7-3820 core processor thread was achieved.