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Monte Carlo eXtreme (MCX)
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Fast photon migration simulations powered by GPU-based parallel computing
- Monte Carlo eXtreme, or MCX, is a Monte Carlo simulation software for photon migration in 3D turbid media. It uses Graphics Processing Units (GPU) based massively parallel computing techniques and is extremely fast compared to traditional CPU-based simulations. Using an nVidia 8800GT graphics card (14MP/114Cores), the acceleration is about 300x~400x with over 1700 parallel threads; this ratio can be as high as 700x on a high-end GTX 295 GPU (multiply by another 2x if both GPUs on GTX295 are used).
- MCX was developed by Qianqian Fang at the Photon Migration Lab, Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital (Harvard Medical School).
- Details of this software can be found 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)
What's New
- [2010/06/24] A recent conference paper by Intel engineers tried to put a question mark to many ">100x GPU/CPU acceleration" claims. It was disappointing to see that they had picked an MC code that performed poorly on GPU (and double precision). Hope they find this website as pointed out by nVidia's official response and this blog. Update: see my comments to this thread, hope I made myself clear :)
- [2010/05/14] A recent commit allows one to choose which GPU to use on a multi-GPU system. MCX was recently tested on a GTX 470 card and had achieved a speed of 12800 photons/millisecond using over 40000 threads and a block size of 512. This is 4x faster than the results with 8800GT (and 1200x times faster than a 64bit CPU core).
- [2010/04/12] Here are my slides [PDF (3.1M)] for my OSA talk on MCX.
- [2010/03/08] For those who are wondering about the OpenCL version of MCX, I just want to let you know that this has been done! The current version of MCX-OpenCL runs perfectly on ATI Radeon 4890OC, Intel quad-core CPU (with ATI OpenCL implementation) and nVidia CUDA 3.0-beta. I will be sending an email to the mcx-news mailing list when a beta version is available; meanwhile, a short paper is on its way. Email me if you want to have a preview of the code.
- [2009/12/20] The final release of MCX 0.2 has arrived. You can read the announcement here and download the binaries and source codes from the Download page. Two mailing lists were created to facilitate discussions.
- [2009/12/09] A cross-platform GUI for Monte Carlo eXtreme, MCX Studio, is 99% working. It will be included in the final version of MCX 0.2. You can find some screenshots here.
- [2009/10/21] The paper describing this software is now published online at Optics Express website. The abstract and PDF can be browsed from this link. Also, support for Windows is now available. Executable will be uploaded and please check out here.
- [2009/10/20] The first public release of MCX, version 0.2 beta, is now ready for download. Both binary and source code are provided. To get started, please checkout the online documentation. Please let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions. Ideas on new features or collaborations are welcome!
- [2009/05/01] The software package is currently under a series of internal tests for processing real application data. We will keep you posted when the binary software package is ready for public test.