Highly-parallelized simulation of a pixelated LArTPC on a GPU

• Published in: Journal of instrumentation Vol. 18; no. 4; p. P04034
• Main Authors: Adamov, G., Adams, D., Aimard, B., Alton, A., Aurisano, A., Bambah, B., Basharina-Freshville, A., Behera, B., Bellettini, G., Benjamin, D., Betancourt, M., Bezerra, A.T., Chalifour, M., Chen, H., Chen-Wishart, Z., Cicero, V., Cui, Y., Cussans, D., De, K., Di Falco, S., Englezos, P., Flanagan, W., Friedland, A., Gallas, A., Gardiner, S., Gastler, D., Girerd, C., Granados, E., Groetschla, F.T., Guffanti, D., Haiston, J., Hayes, C., Holvey, T., Hostert, M., Howell, R., Hristova, I., Iles, G., Jackson, C.M., Jung, C.K., Kakorin, I., Kashur, L., Kearns, E., Kozhukalov, V., Kubu, M., Kumar, J., Lantwin, O., Laycock, P., Liu, Y., Machado, P., Madigan, P., Marchan, M., Marfatia, D., Marshall, C.M., Marshall, J., McFarland, K.S., McNab, A., Mena, O., Mills, J., Miranda, O.G., Mokhov, N., Mouster, G., Mu, W., Muraz, J., Nelson, M., Newcomer, M., Niner, E., Onishchuk, Y., Patrick, C., Peeters, S.J.M., Pershey, D., Poppi, F., Raut, S., Razakamiandra, R.F., Rincón, E.V., Santoro, D., Scarpelli, A., Schefke, T., Sinev, G., Singh Chauhan, S., Sokolov, S., Sousa, A., Spitz, J., Spooner, N.J.C., Stancari, M., Suter, L., Suvorov, Y., Tarpara, E., Thea, A., Todorović, N., Trzaska, W.H., Tsai, Y., Tsang, K.V., Tull, C., Tyler, J., Usher, T., Vaughan, N., Whilhelmi, J., Wilkinson, C., Zalesak, J., Zwaska, R.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bristol IOP Publishing 01.04.2023
• Subjects: Algorithms; Argon; Central processing units; Computer simulation; CPUs; Detector modelling and simulations II (electric fields, charge transport, multiplication and induction, pulse formation, electron emission, etc); Graphics processing units; Monte Carlo simulation; Noble liquid detectors (scintillation, ionization, double-phase); Physics; Pixels; Simulation methods and programs; Time projection Chambers (TPC); Computing; Time projection chambers; Simulation methods and programs
• ISSN: 1748-0221; 1748-0221
• DOI: 10.1088/1748-0221/18/04/P04034

The rapid development of general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) is allowing the implementation of highly-parallelized Monte Carlo simulation chains for particle physics experiments. This technique is particularly suitable for the simulation of a pixelated charge readout for time projection chambers, given the large number of channels that this technology employs. Here we present the first implementation of a full microphysical simulator of a liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) equipped with light readout and pixelated charge readout, developed for the DUNE Near Detector. The software is implemented with an end-to-end set of GPU-optimized algorithms. The algorithms have been written in Python and translated into CUDA kernels using Numba, a just-in-time compiler for a subset of Python and NumPy instructions. The GPU implementation achieves a speed up of four orders of magnitude compared with the equivalent CPU version. The simulation of the current induced on 10^3 pixels takes around 1 ms on the GPU, compared with approximately 10 s on the CPU. The results of the simulation are compared against data from a pixel-readout LArTPC prototype.