Given Geant4 11.3 and CUDA Question

Ideas and Requirements
1

Given Geant4 11.3 has VecGeom with CUDA support and NVIDIA has just announced
the Jetson Orin Nano Super Developer kit for just under £500.

Will there be any interest in building Geant4 for the Arm architecture?

Same question for all the Linux libraries that people use?

Obviously a new architecture would require a lot of effort to support new versions etc
I know that for the NVIDIA Jetson has a linux based on Ubuntu but was never sure how well it was kept up to date.

Would this be of interest in Uni’s etc ? Or would people just gravitate to cloud servers with GPU’s and CUDA support?

Is this something that NVIDIA might provide some funding for?

2

It’s already been done - at least, successful builds have been done of the ATLAS stack including Geant4: https://cds.cern.ch/record/2867928/. Many other successful builds have been done, including on Grace Hopper.

If you mean “does Geant4 support running on GPUs” then the answer is “not at present”. There are R&D projects and codes looking at this, for example

3

Good to know, I was meaning as there is support for VecGeom, I thought I read something about support of CUDA for VecGeom but maybe not.

4

VecGeom does support CUDA - and in fact is used as the geometry modeller/navigator in AdePT and Celeritas. As implemented, it’s one of the bottlenecks on GPU, so surface-based modelling is being investigated see: 29th Geant4 Collaboration Meeting (7-11 October 2024): Plenary: Geometry · Indico