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Porting G4-STORK particle simulation software to GPU

GEANT-4 is a widely-used software toolkit used to simulate particle interactions. Several members of McMaster's Engineering Physics department have created G4-STORK, a program that uses the GEANT-4 toolkit to simulate particle interactions in McMaster's nuclear reactor. Due to the computation time needed to run these simulations, they cannot simulate particle interactions that take place over the course of minutes (or even seconds), or that have a large numbers of particles.

The goal of this project is to port the calculations done by GEANT-4 to a GPU architecture using CUDA. This will significantly increase the performance of the simulations, allowing researchers to use more accurate models of the system.

Table of Contents

Prerequisites
Installation
Testing Installation
Compiling After Changes
Troubleshooting
FAQ

Prerequisites

The following operating systems are supported:

  • Mac OS X (tested on 10.11 with Xcode 6)
  • Fedora 20

Note: Xcode 7 includes a newer version of the clang compiler that is not yet supported.

To run computations on the GPU with CUDA, a relatively new NVIDIA GPU is required.

Installation

Install cmake

  1. Download cmake 2.8.4 from https://cmake.org/files/v2.8/
  2. Follow the instructions in the readme included with the download

Install topc-2.5.2

  1. cd /path/to/GEANT4-GPU/topc-2.5.2
  2. ./configure (installs to usr/local/include and usr/local/src)
  3. make install

Install marshalgen-1.0

  1. (Fedora only) yum install bison flex
  2. cd /path/to/GEANT4-GPU/marshalgen-1.0
  3. make
  4. At this point, make sure that the usr/local/marshalgen-1.0 folder exists and contains all the same files as the marshalgen-1.0 folder in GEANT4-GPU. If not, simply copy those files into usr/local/marshalgen-1.0.
  5. Note: there is a syntax error in marshalgen-1.0/Phase1/mgen.pl line 683 (one extra \) before the ;\n";. The version in the repo is fixed, but if you downloaded marshalgen from another source, you need to fix this)

Install GEANT-4

  1. (Fedora only) yum install expat-devel
  2. mkdir /path/to/GEANT4-GPU/geant4.10.01.p02-build /path/to/GEANT4-GPU/ geant4.10.01.p02-install
  3. cd /path/to/GEANT4-GPU/geant4.10.01.p02-build
  4. cmake -DGEANT4_INSTALL_DATA=ON -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/path/to/GEANT4-GPU/ geant4.10.01.p02-install /path/to/GEANT4-GPU/geant4.10.01.p02
  5. make -jN where N is the number of processors on your computer
  6. make install

Install G4-STORK

  1. mkdir /path/to/GEANT4-GPU/G4STORK/Build
  2. cd /path/to/GEANT4-GPU/G4STORK/Build
  3. source /path/to/GEANT4-GPU/geant4.10.01.p02-install/bin/geant4.sh
  4. rm -rf CMakeCache.txt CMakeFiles/
  5. cmake -DTOPC_USE=1 -DGeant4_DIR=/path/to/GEANT4-GPU/geant4.10.01.p02-install/lib/Geant4.10.00.p02/Geant4Config.cmake ../ (note: it may be lib64 instead of lib on Linux)
  6. make -f ../MarshalMakefile (note: if this fails, make sure usr/local/marshalgen-1.0 contains the marshalgen binary)
  7. make -jN where N is the number of processors on your computer
  8. Open /path/to/GEANT4-GPU/Build/addFilesG4STORK and modify the top few variables with the correct paths for your install.

Setting Environment Variables
It is recommended to add a line to your bash_profile that loads the Geant4 environment variables, like so:

source /path/to/geant4.10.00.p02-install/bin/geant4.sh

Testing Installation

Testing GEANT4
There are several basic examples included with GEANT4 which can be run to test the install. To run the example B1:

  1. cd /path/to/GEANT4-GPU/geant4.10.00.p02/examples/basic
  2. mkdir B1-build
  3. cd B1-build
  4. cmake -DGeant4_DIR=/path/to/GEANT4-GPU/geant4.10.00.p02-install/lib/Geant4-10.0.2 ../B1
  5. make -jN where N is the number of cores on your machine
  6. ./exampleB1

Testing G4-STORK
To test that everything installed properly, run the following command from /path/to/GEANT4-GPU/G4STORK/Build:

./g4stork ../InputFiles/C6LatticeInput.txt

If it runs with no errors, then you should be all set up!

Compiling After Changes

Every time you change the source code of G4STORK or GEANT4, you need to recompile. From /path/to/GEANT4-GPU/G4STORK/Build run the recompile script to recompile the project with:

./addfilesG4STORK

You can optionally add arguments when running the script, open it in a text editor to see available arguments.

Once that is done, the g4stork executable should be updated to include the changes to your code.

Troubleshooting

Potential problems include:

  • Spaces in pathname to GEANT-GPU
  • Unsupported OS
  • Newer version of Clang (included with Xcode 7), download Xcode 6 and uninstall Xcode 7 if this is the case

FAQ

What is GEANT-4
Many physics researchers use GEANT-4 to learn about how particles interact with a specific environment. It is a toolkit (i.e. library) that uses the Monte Carlo model, meaning each particle's properties are calculated independently according to certain probabilities. It runs all those calculations, and provides output.

What is G4-STORK
McMaster's Engineering Physics department created G4-STORK -- a project that leverages GEANT-4 to study the McMaster nuclear reactor. G4-STORK includes the necessary data structures and algorithms specific to the reactor, and also adds CPU parallelization via the MPI model.

Why will running the simulations on a GPU improve the performance
GPU's contain a large amount of cores that can perform calculations much more quickly than a CPU if the problem is well-suited to parallelization. GEANT-4 runs relatively simple calculations on millions of particles, and each particle is completely independent of the others. This is exactly that sort of well-suited problem, and stands to see large performance gains.