Monte-Carlo raytracing has proven an indispensable tool for the design of neutron scattering instruments, as demonstrated by its use on virtually every major neutron instrumentation project over the last two decades. The Neutron and Muon Instrumentation Development Group at ISIS has recently developed a new Monte-Carlo raytracing package, RAMP (https://www.isis.stfc.ac.uk/Pages/RAMP_paper.pdf), which takes advantage of GPU parallelization to exceed the performance of existing CPU-based software by a factor of 100. These gains open for new applications that promise to transform not only neutron instrument design, but also data analysis and even how neutron experiments are run.
Now that the basic kernel of RAMP has been verified and benchmarked, there are several software development-oriented tasks that first must be done to achieve this potential. These include:
* Optimization of the core execution loop of RAMP;
* Establishing a continuous integration workflow involving unit testing of kernels and integration testing through a suite of realistic instrument models;
* Writing a body of documentation to guide user development of new instrument components;
* Creating a project homepage and instrument component repository that will serve as a central hub for contributed components.
Once RAMP has been established as a high-performance ray-tracing application, following tasks will include for example:
* Full simulation of instrument performance including backgrounds (i.e. non-ideal scattering) from sample control equipment;
* Integration with instrument data analysis applications
* Optimisation of instrument design by allowing instrument components to evolve during the ray-tracing simulation
All the above will be done in close collaboration with the Neutron and Muon Instrument Development Group.
For more information, please contact goran.nilsen@stfc.ac.uk. The RAMP codebase is hosted on Github (https://github.com/gcassella/RAMP).
