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Dynamical low-rank approximation for radiation transport with random input

Applicant Dr. Jonas Kusch
Subject Area Mathematics
Term from 2021 to 2023
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 491976834
 
Final Report Year 2023

Final Report Abstract

Computer simulations are of significant importance for problems in radiation transport ranging from nuclear engineering to cancer therapy. However, conventional simulation techniques exhibit a large memory footprint and prohibitive computational costs. This stems mainly from the large number of variables the solution depends on which are time, energy, spatial position, direction of travel and uncertainties. In this work we have tackled these challenged by employing dynamical low-rank approximation (DLRA) which is a computational method that recently gained a remarkable amount of attention due to its reduced memory and computational costs required to perform accurate numerical simulations. The objectives of this project were to 1) construct novel DLRA methods for radiation transport and especially radiation treatment planning, 2) explore the stability of the proposed methods, and 3) investigate how developed methods can be used on high performance computing architectures. A notable finding of this project is that DLRA is especially well suited for proton radiation therapy simulations as the dynamics of proton radiation can be captured very accurately at significantly reduced computational costs and memory requirements. Moreover, the reduced memory footprint makes DLRA very well suited for GPU architectures which are common in clinical usage. The applicability of DLRA in proton therapy simulations has been made possible by several achievements in understanding the mathematical properties of DLRA which has led to novel discretizations which are provably stable and capture essential properties of the problem. Furthermore, this mathematical understanding has enabled us to construct a new time integrator (that is, a numerical method which evolves the solution in time) which enhances the efficiency of DLRA while extending the parallelism of the method. This new integrator can impact a large number of different applications and improves their efficiency for high performance computing systems.

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