An Update of ARCHER, a Monte Carlo Radiation Transport Software Testbed for Emerging Hardware Such as GPUs

Heterogeneous computing systems involving the graphics processing unit (GPU) and other accelerators such as the coprocessor are playing an increasingly important role in scientific computing. However, none of the existing production Monte Carlo (MC) radiation transport codes were designed to take advantage of such heterogeneous computer architectures. In this paper, we describe the development of a software package, called ARCHER Accelerated Radiation-transport Computations in Heterogeneous EnviRonments, which is designed as a software testbed for research on how to accelerate Monte Carlo calculations using the Nvidia GPU and the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor.