Performance Evaluation of Multithreaded Geant4 Simulations Using an Intel Xeon Phi Cluster

International audienceThe objective of this study is to evaluate the performances of Intel Xeon Phi hardware accelerators for Geant4 simulations, especially for multithreaded applications. We present the complete methodology to guide users for the compilation of their Geant4 applications on Phi processors. Then, we propose series of benchmarks to compare the performance of Xeon CPUs and Phi processors for a Geant4 example dedicated to the simulation of electron dose point kernels, the TestEm12 example. First, we compare a distributed execution of a sequential version of the Geant4 example on both architectures before evaluating the multithreaded version of the Geant4 example. If Phi processors demonstrated their ability to accelerate computing time (till a factor 3.83) when distributing sequential Geant4 simulations, we do not reach the same level of speedup when considering the multithreaded version of the Geant4 example