Parallel multigrid solver of radiative transfer equation for photon transport via graphics processing unit
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Updated: May 17, 2026

Scattering And Absorption of Light in Planetary Regoliths
Published on: July 1, 2019
Hao Gao1, Lan Phan, Yuting Lin
1Emory University, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Atlanta, Georgia 30322, USA. haog@mathcs.emory.edu
Abstract:
A graphics processing unit-based parallel multigrid solver for a radiative transfer equation with vacuum boundary condition or reflection boundary condition is presented for heterogeneous media with complex geometry based on two-dimensional triangular meshes or three-dimensional tetrahedral meshes. The computational complexity of this parallel solver is linearly proportional to the degrees of freedom in both angular and spatial variables, while the full multigrid method is utilized to minimize the number of iterations. The overall gain of speed is roughly 30 to 300 fold with respect to our prior multigrid solver, which depends on the underlying regime and the parallelization. The numerical validations are presented with the MATLAB codes at https://sites.google.com/site/rtefastsolver/.
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