Validation of Monte carlo Geant4 multithreading code for a 6 MV photon beam of varian linac on the grid computing

Abstract

Aim

To evaluate the computation time efficiency of the multithreaded code (G4Linac-MT) in the dosimetry application, using the high performance of the HPC-Marwan grid to determine with high accuracy the initial parameters of the 6 MV photon beam of Varian CLINAC 2100C.

Background

The difficulty of Monte Carlo methods is the long computation time, this is one of the disadvantages of the Monte Carlo methods.

Materials and methods

Calculations are performed by the multithreaded code G4Linac-MT and Geant4.10.04.p02 using the HPC-Marwan computing grid to evaluate the computing speed for each code. The multithreaded version is tested in several CPUs to evaluate the computing speed according to the number of CPUs used. The results were compared to the measurements using different types of comparisons, TPR_20.10, penumbra, mean dose error and gamma index.

Results

The results obtained for this work indicate a much higher computing time saving for the G4Linac-MT version compared to the Geant4.10.04 version, the computing time decreases with the number of CPUs used, can reach about 12 times if 64CPUs are used. After optimization of the initial electron beam parameters, the results of the dose simulations obtained for this work are in very good agreement with the experimental measurements with a mean dose error of up to 0.41% on the PDDs and 1.79% on the lateral dose.

Conclusions

The gain in computation time leads us to perform Monte Carlo simulations with a large number of events which gives a high accuracy of the dosimetry results obtained in this work.