Accelerating Optical Photon Simulation in DUNE with Opticks

Abstract

Optical photon simulation is among the most computationally demanding tasks in complex and large detector geometries. In the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), the scale of the far-detector modules makes photon-by-photon transport with \texttt{GEANT4} prohibitively expensive on CPUs. We present the first implementation and performance evaluation of GPU-accelerated optical photon simulation at the 10~kt scale, based on \texttt{Opticks} and applied to the DUNE far-detector horizontal-drift (FD-HD) geometry. On the full FD-HD geometry, \texttt{Opticks} propagates the same photons as \texttt{GEANT4} with a speedup of $313 \pm 3$ over single-threaded and $83 \pm 1$ over four-thread \texttt{GEANT4}, and is validated against the reference \texttt{GEANT4} simulation across all metrics considered. We further integrate \texttt{Opticks} into the \texttt{LArSoft}-based DUNE software stack. Photons simulated on the GPU with \texttt{GEANT4}-equivalent physics retain full Monte Carlo fidelity at a computational cost that makes high-statistics optical studies and the generation of labeled datasets for machine learning feasible at the kiloton scale.