A graphics processor-based intranuclear cascade and evaporation simulation

Monte Carlo simulations of the transport of protons in human tissue have been deployed on graphics processing units (GPUs) with impressive results. To provide a more complete treatment of non-elastic nuclear interactions in these simulations, we developed a fast intranuclear cascade-evaporation simulation for the GPU. This can be used to model non-elastic proton collisions on any therapeutically relevant nuclei at incident energies between 20 and 250 MeV. Predictions are in good agreement with Geant4.9.6p2. It takes approximately 2 s to calculate 1×106 200 MeV proton-16O interactions on a NVIDIA GTX680 GPU. A speed-up factor of ∼20 relative to one Intel i7-3820 core processor thread was achieved.