Advancements in parallel and cluster computing have made many complex
Monte Carlo simulations possible in the past several years. Unfortunately, cluster
computers are large, expensive, and still not fast enough to make the Monte Carlo
technique useful for calculations requiring a near real-time evaluation period. For Monte
Carlo simulations, a small computational unit called a Field Programmable Gate Array
(FPGA) is capable of bringing the power of a large cluster computer into any personal
computer (PC). Because an FPGA is capable of executing Monte Carlo simulations with
a high degree of parallelism, a simulation run on a large FPGA can be executed at a
much higher rate than an equivalent simulation on a modern single-processor desktop
PC. In this thesis, a simple radiation transport problem involving moderate energy
photons incident on a three-dimensional target is discussed. By comparing the
theoretical evaluation speed of this transport problem on a large FPGA to the evaluation
speed of the same transport problem using standard computing techniques, it is shown
that it is possible to accelerate Monte Carlo computations significantly using FPGAs. In
fact, we have found that our simple photon transport test case can be evaluated in excess
of 650 times faster on a large FPGA than on a 3.2 GHz Pentium-4 desktop PC running MCNP5âÂÂan acceleration factor that we predict will be largely preserved for most
Monte Carlo simulations.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/4875 |
| Date | 25 April 2007 |
| Creators | Pasciak, Alexander Samuel |
| Contributors | Ford, John R. |
| Publisher | Texas A&M University |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Thesis, text |
| Format | 1471891 bytes, electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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