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FREDmpc

FREDmpc allows ray generation, ray tracing and analyses to be performed with GPUs for incredibly fast, radiometrically precise opto-mechanical ray tracing and analysis.

As the top edition of FRED, FREDmpc includes all the existing capabilities of FRED Standard and FRED Optimum, and so all of FRED’s modeling, ray trace and analyses capabilities can be applied in the usual manner with the addition that ray tracing and analyses can optionally be performed on the GPUs upon request.

By moving the calculation to the GPU simulation times can be reduced from days to hours, or in some cases, minutes!

GPU-Enabled Optical Engineering

This is an opto-mechanical model of a barcode scanner, key components include a LED source, CAD-imported housing, a fresnel lens, and Lambertian surface scatter on the target surfaces. Reproduction of the pattern’s image on the detector requires a large number of rays to be traced. Therefore the orders-of-magnitude raytrace speed of FREDmpc is incredibly valuable in allowing the user to perform this virtual prototyping quickly and efficiently.

  • Radiometrically precise opto-mechanical raytracing

  • 100-1000x faster than multi-threaded CPU raytracing

  • Single/double precision accuracy modes

  • Exact representation of common optical surfaces

  • Support for ideal lenses, gratings, polarization effects

  • Option for both monte-carlo and ray splitting specular (ghosting) and scatter modes

  • Raytrace paths reporting for stray light analysis

CPU Raytrace

Core i7 x 12 threads

1,000,000 rays

4.5 minutes
GPU Raytrace

RTX 3070

100,000,000 rays

80 seconds

Why FREDmpc?

  • Would your analysis benefit from tracing 1 billion or 1 trillion rays?

  • Do you often have to run calculations overnight or over multiple days in order to obtain a statistically and radiometrically valid result?

  • Do you have to trace billions of rays through complex optomechanical systems containing thousands of surfaces?

  • If so, then FREDmpc could be beneficial. The question is: how much is your time worth?

FREDmpc is continually under development to provide new capabilities to the software with every new release. Please view the latest software release information to learn about the recent development and software improvements.

CPU Requirements

  • FRED only runs on Windows. We recommend Windows 10.

  • FRED performs multi-threaded calculations on up to 17 threads while FRED Optimum supports up to 127 threads. Any number of threads beyond the limit for your version of FRED are not used.

  • Many components of FRED, such as BASIC scripting calculations and model updating, are not multi-threaded. Therefore, high-speed processors are advantageous. In many scenarios, performance is better for a smaller number of fast CPUs compared to a larger number of slow CPUs (e.g., 16 cores at 3.2 GHz vs. 24 cores at 2.4 GHz).

  • We recommend 16+ GB of RAM to avoid the need for temporarily buffering ray data on disk when tracing large numbers of rays.

  • Sometimes, buffering ray data on disk cannot be avoided (e.g., when you need to trace more rays than can be stored in the available RAM). For this reason, it is beneficial to have a system with a high disk I/O. This stands for input/output, which is the speed of data transfer between the hard disk and the RAM. A solid state drive (SSD) is recommended.

GPU Requirements

FREDmpc requires one or more local NVIDIA GPU boards with compute capability 6.0 or newer. Multiple GPU boards operating in parallel are supported.

The graphs below show the relative performance of various GPU boards that have been benchmarked with FREDmpc, where a GeForce GTX 1650 has been used as the reference. For example, in single precision mode the RTX 3090 executed roughly 8 times faster than the same tests on the GeForce GTX 1650. In double precision mode, the A100 executed roughly 18 times faster than the GTX 1650.

Benchmark data last updated May 2022

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