Celeritas R&D Report: Accelerating Geant4

Abstract

Celeritas is a new Monte Carlo (MC) detector simulation code designed for computationally intensive applications on high-performance heterogeneous architectures. In the past two years Celeritas has advanced from prototyping a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)-based single physics model in infinite medium to implementing a full set of electromagnetic (EM) physics processes in complex geometries. The current release of Celeritas, version 0.4, has incorporated full device-based navigation, an event loop in the presence of magnetic fields, and detector hit scoring. New functionality incorporates a scheduler to offload electromagnetic physics to the GPU within a Geant4-driven simulation, enabling straightforward integration of Celeritas into the high energy physics (HEP) experimental frameworks CMSSW and ATLAS FullSimLight. On the Perlmutter supercomputer, Celeritas performs EM physics between 3× and 18× faster using the machine’s Nvidia GPUs compared to using only CPUs, corresponding to an electrical power efficiency up to a factor of 5. When running a multithreaded Geant4 ATLAS test beam application with full hadronic physics, using Celeritas to accelerate the EM physics results in an overall simulation speedup of 1.7–2.2× on GPU and 1.2× on CPU. In a CMS test application using tt¯ events and the prototype Run 4 configuration, compared to Geant4 CPU, Celeritas with a Nvidia A100 improves overall throughput up to a factor of 2.7× but cannot be efficiently shared with more than 8 cores.