OpenMP-Based Monte Carlo Dose Calculation for Radiotherapy Treatment Planning on the Intel MIC Architecture

Monte Carlo (MC) simulation plays an important part in dose calculation for radiotherapy treatment planning. Since the accuracy of MC simulation relies on the number of simulated particles histories, it´s very time-consuming. The Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture, which consists of more than 50 cores and supports many parallel programming models, provides an efficient alternative for accelerating MC dose calculation. This paper implements the OpenMP-based MC Dose Planning Method (DPM) for radiotherapy treatment problems on the Intel MIC architecture. The implementation has been verified on the target MIC coprocessor including 57 cores. The results demonstrate that the OpenMP-based DPM implementation exhibits very accurate results and achieves the maximum speedup of 10.53 times in comparison to the original DPM one on a Xeon E5-2670 CPU. Additionally, speedup and efficiency of the implementation running on the different number of cores in MIC are also reported.