Sirocco is a Monte Carlo Radiative Transfer (MCRT) software package for modelling the ionisation state of astrophysical outflows from compact accreting objects. It has been in active development for over 20 years, and represents the current state-of-the-art in its field. MCRT is a computationally expensive numerical technique that requires an HPC facility to execute in a reasonable amount of time. We introduced GPU parallelism to accelerate matrix operations, which drastically reduced the time for these calculations. We profiled the code to identify performance bottlenecks which prevented scaling beyond 32 CPUs. We performed code refactoring and optimisation, and developed solutions to improve parallel scaling.
“This project has been outstandingly successful… Ed has completely solved this problem, with our code now scaling near perfectly to hundreds of cores. This will open up entirely new research directions for us.”
Professor Christian Knigge
Southampton Theory Astrophysics and Gravity, School of Physics & Astronomy