A new ray-tracing scheme for 3D diffuse radiation transfer on highly parallel architectures

Abstract

We present a new numerical scheme to solve the transfer of diffuse radiation on three-dimensional mesh grids which is efficient on processors with highly parallel architecture such as recently popular GPUs and CPUs with multi- and many-core architectures. The scheme is based on the ray-tracing method and the computational cost is proportional to $N-{\rm m}^{\,5/3}$, where Nm is the number of mesh grids, and is devised to compute the radiation transfer along each light-ray completely in parallel, with appropriate grouping of the light-rays. We find that the performance of our scheme scales well with the number of adopted CPU cores and GPUs, and also that our scheme is nicely parallelized on a multi-node system by adopting the multiple wave front scheme, and the performance scales well with the amount of computational resources. As numerical tests to validate our scheme and to give a physical criterion for the angular resolution of our ray-tracing scheme, we perform several numerical simulations of the photoionization of neutral hydrogen gas by ionizing radiation sources without the "on-the-spot" approximation, in which the transfer of diffuse radiation by radiative recombination is incorporated in a self-consistent manner.