Architecture Design for Particle Transport Code Acceleration

Abstract

The stochastic simulation method of particle transport is usually used to solve the characteristic quantity of a large number of moving particles.Particle transport problems are widely found in the fields of medicine,astrophysics and nuclear phy-sics.The main challenge of current stochastic simulation methods for particle transport is the gap between the number of simulation samples supported by computers,the simulation timescale,and researchers’ needs to study practical problems.Since the development of processor performance has entered a new historical stage with the stagnation of process size progress,the integration of complex on-chip structures no longer meets the current requirements.For particle transport programs,this paper carries out a series of architecture design works.By analyzing and using the parallelism and access characteristics of the program,simplified kernel and reconfigurable cache are designed to speed up the program.Experiments show that compared to the traditional architecture composed of multiple out-of-order cores,this architecture can obtain more than 4.5x in performance per watt and 2.78x in performance per area,which lays a foundation for the further study of large-scale many-nucleus particle transport acce-lerator.

Keywords

• particle transport|monte carlo|architecture|accelerator|pipeline