N2D4  Monte-Carlo Software Developments

Tuesday, Nov. 3  16:30-18:10  Pacific Salon 1&2

Session Chair:  Steffen Hauf, European X-ray Free Electron Laser Facility GmbH, Germany; Georg Weidenspointner, XFEL, Germany

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(16:30) N2D4-1, MCNP 6.1.2 - New Features Demonstrated

G. W. McKinney, G. E. McMath, T. A. Wilcox

Nuclear Engineering Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, US

In July of 2013, the MCNP 6.1.0 Production version was released, which touted over 30 new capabilities since the final releases of MCNP5 and MCNPX. About one year later, in September of 2014, the MCNP 6.1.1 Beta version was released, which contained eleven new features and was the topic of our 2014 IEEE/NSS paper. Since that time, work has been underway on several new capabilities that have been implemented in the 6.1.2 Beta version of MCNP, which is slated for release near the end of 2015. In this paper, we discuss ten significant features and enhancements and provide sample results for a select few. The MCNP 6.1.2 enhancement list includes: spontaneous-decay source improvements, background-source upgrades, cosmic-source improvements, an update to the decay-library file, correlated prompt secondary-particle production, collision-based cell flagging, and neutron detector response-functions.

(16:50) N2D4-2, Extending Geant4 Parallelism with External Libraries (MPI, TBB) and Its Use on HPC Resource

A. Dotti1, M. Asai1, G. Barrand2, I. Hrivnacova3, K. Murakami4

1SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Menlo Park, CA, USA
2LAL Orsay, Orsay, France
3IN2P3/IPN, Orsay, France
4KEK, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan

With Geant4 Version 10.0, released in December 2013, one of the most widely used Monte-Carlo codes has been ported to take full advantage of multi- and many-core CPUs thanks to the introduction of event-level parallelism via multithreading. In this paper we review recent developments to allow for a better integration of parallel Geant4 jobs with external libraries. We have chosen to develop examples using Intel\textsuperscript{\textregistered} Threading Building Block (for short TBB) as an alternative parallelization approach to the native Geant4 POSIX one since LHC experiments are evaluating this system as the library to create parallel applications. To simplify the scaling of a Geant4 application across nodes on a cluster we are improving the support of MPI in Geant4. In particular it is now possible to run an hybrid MPI/MT application that uses MPI to scale across nodes and MT to scale across cores.\\ The recent developments allow users to easily implement parallel application resources that scale on a very large number of nodes and cores typical of HPC resources.

(17:10) N2D4-3, Multi-Threaded Geant4 on the Xeon Phi with Complex High-Energy Physics Geometry

S. Farrell1, P. Calafiura1, A. Dotti2, M. Asai2, R. Monnard3

1Physics and Computational Research, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Berkeley, CA, USA
2Geant4, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Menlo Park, CA, USA
3Computer Science, HES-SO Haute école spécialisée de Suisse occidentale, Fribourg, Switzerland

In the midst of the multi-core era, the computing models employed by high-energy-physics (HEP) experiments must evolve to embrace the trends of the processor-chip-making industry. As the computing needs of these experiments—particularly those at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—grow, adoption of many-core architectures and highly-parallel programming models is essential to maintain scientific capability. Intel's many-integrated-core line of processors (Xeon Phi) is one such platform for highly-parallel applications which is currently used in some of the top supercomputers and will be used in next-generation supercomputers. HEP simulation with Geant4 is a good early use-case for this architecture because it is a major consumer of CPU resources in HEP experiments, and because Geant4 already supports multi-threading since release 10.0. We have thus developed a Geant4 application to test and study HEP particle simulations on the Xeon Phi (HepExpMT). This application serves as a demonstrator of the feasibility and performance capability of utilizing this advanced architecture with a complex LHC detector geometry. It provides valuable technical feedback and performance measurements for Geant4 which have already led to numerous bugfixes and memory performance improvements in the most recent release. For the I/O, an extension for ROOT has been implemented which uses the Intel SCIF library for efficient data transfers. The HepExpMT application shows that Geant4 has very good scaling performance up to a large number of threads on the Xeon Phi.

(17:30) N2D4-4, Monte Carlo Management at CMS

D. Kcira

CALTECH, Pasadena, CA, USA

On behalf of the Compact Muon Solenoid

The analysis of the LHC data at the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment requires the production of a large number of simulated events. During the runI of LHC (2010-2012), CMS has produced over 12 Billion simulated events, organized in approximately sixty different campaigns each emulating specific detector conditions and LHC running conditions (pile up). This sets the scale for the challeges in simulated events production of runII, starting in 2015, which will exceed what was needed for runI. In order to aggregate the information needed for the configuration and prioritization of the events production, assure the book-keeping of all the processing requests placed by the physics analysis groups, and to interface with the CMS production infrastructure, the web-based service 'Monte Carlo Management' (McM) has been developed and put in production in 2013. McM is based on recent server infrastructure technology (CherryPy + javascript) and relies on a CouchDB database back-end. This contribution will cover the two years of operational experience managing samples of simulated events for CMS, the evolution of its functionalities and the extension of its capability to monitor the status and advancement of the events production.

(17:50) N2D4-5, An Educational AR System for Visualizing Radiation Interactions with Human Tissue

Y. Iwakura1, C. Mouri2, H. Tenzou3, S. Manabe1, R. Johnston3

1Advanced Course in Electronics, Information and Communication Engineering, Electronic Systems Course, National Institute of Technology, Kagawa College, 551 Koda, Takuma-cho, Mitoyo 769-1192, Japan
2Director of Technical Education Support Center, National Institute of Technology, Kagawa College, 551 Koda, Takuma-cho, Mitoyo 769-1192, Japan
3Department of Electronic Systems Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Kagawa College, 551 Koda, Takuma-cho, Mitoyo 769-1192, Japan

The purpose of this study was to develop an educational system in order to visualize radiation interactions in the user’s forearm through the use of Augmented Reality (AR) technology. The interactions are calculated by PHITS simulation code and the particle trajectories or the energy depositions are overlaid on live images captured by a USB camera. The program has four modes of operation, X-ray Tomography, Heavy Ion Therapy, PET Imaging, and BNCT. By selecting one, the user can learn about interactions of photons, carbon ions, positrons, and neutrons, respectively. As a result, the user can see a simulation of the different interactions caused by each of the four kinds of radiation inside the user’s own forearm as 640×480 pixel composited images on a PC screen at just over 5 fps.