GPU-based acceleration for Monte Carlo ray-tracing of complex 3D scene

This paper introduces two acceleration methods for the Monte Carlo (MC) simulation of photons on Graphic Processing Units (GPUs). The GPU-based methods for performing MC method enable the use of the model in more complex vegetation canopy. We describe the computation and how it is mapped onto the many parallel computational units on one NVIDIA GT240M graphic card. For a vegetation canopy consisting of 13020 polygons, the speedup is 16.45× over the code on an Intel T6400 dual-core processor. And this method can be accelerated tremendously by employing better GPU processor, or using more GPUs for simulation.