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Monte Carlo eXtreme (MCX)
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Fast photon transport simulator powered by GPU-based parallel computing
- Monte Carlo eXtreme, or MCX, is a Monte Carlo software for time-resolved photon transport simulations in 3D turbid media. It uses Graphics Processing Units (GPU) based massively parallel computing techniques and is extremely fast compared to traditional single-threaded CPU-based simulations. Using an NVIDIA GTX 980 graphics card, the acceleration is about 300x-400x compared to a single thread on an Intel Core i7 4770k.
- MCX is an open-source software developed by Qianqian Fang. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Bioengineering at Northeastern University.
- The algorithm behind this software is detailed in the following paper:
- Qianqian Fang and David A. Boas, "Monte Carlo Simulation of Photon Migration in 3D Turbid Media Accelerated by Graphics Processing Units," Opt. Express, vol. 17, issue 22, pp. 20178-20190 (2009)
This website also hosts another open-source Monte Carlo code - Mesh-based Monte Carlo, or MMC - developed by the same author. Please browse MMC page for more details.
What's New
- [2017/04/02] It is our pleasure to announce MCX (v2017.3, Dark Matter)! This is a major update over the previous release (v2016.4) announced a year ago. The new MCX is significantly faster (2.5x faster on Kepler, and 1.5x-1.7x faster on Maxwell/Pascal). New features, such as printing progress bar, recording photon trajectories and diffuse reflectance are now supported. Please checkout our ChangeLog and Github commit log for details. We'd like to thank NIH/NIGMS for the funding support to make this new release possible!
- [2016/04/23] The all new MCX (v2016.4, Dark Matter) has finally arrived! The 2016.4 release is a major update from all previous releases, boasting numerous improvement and bug fixes. The new MCX is significantly more accurate (via a new ray-tracing algorithm and atomic operations) and also significantly faster (2x-3x speedup on Maxwell GPUs). About 1/3 of the source codes have been updated, accumulated through over 1.5 year continuous development. Wtih this new software, we also kick off the MCX Speed Challenge and MCX GPU Benchmark to engage with the user community. We urge all current users to upgrade to this version and rerun all key simulations. We'd like to thank NIH/NIGMS for the funding support to make this new release possible!
- [2015/06/08] It is my great pleasure to announce that, the MCX/MMC project has received a 4-year funding support from the NIH (National Institute of Health)/NIGMS (National Institute of General Medical Sciences) starting this summer! This marks a new chapter for MCX/MMC development. In this new project, I will be working with a number of leading experts, Dr. Simon Arridge (UCL), Dr. David Kaeli (Northeastern) and Dr. Xavier Intes (RPI), on advancing MCX/MMC towards one of the fastest, most comprehensive and accurate photon transport simulator. We will develop rapid computational models not just for forward modeling, but also for rapid image reconstructions; we have also proposed new methods to further speed up simulation by 10x or more. In addition, we plan to organize workshops, share detailed training materials and write intuitive user interfaces to make MCX/MMC even more easy-to-use. A detailed workplan will be posted shortly. I am looking forward to serving this growing community, and meeting everyone in one of our future events!
- [2014/09/23] MCX 0.9.7-2 (code named Dark Matter) is here! This release contains several critical bug fixes; one of them affects all previous MCX releases. You are strongly recommended to upgrade your MCX copy to this version. See release notes for the update details. Download the software from here. I'd like to thank Kim Shultz and David Gasperino@UMN for their patches and bug reports!