Optical Photon Simulation with Mitsuba3

Abstract

Optical photon propagation is an embarrassingly parallel operation, well suited to acceleration on GPU devices. Rendering of images employs similar techniques -- for this reason, a pipeline to offload optical photon propagation from Geant4 to the industry-standard open-source renderer Mitsuba3 has been devised. With the creation of a dedicated plugin for single point multi-source emission, we find a photon propagation rate of $2\times10^{5}$ photons per second per CPU thread using LLVM and $1.2\times10^{6}$ photons per second per GPU using CUDA. This represents a speed-up of 70 on CPU and 400 on GPU over Geant4 and is competitive with other similar applications. The potential for further applications is discussed.