Technical Note: Radiotherapy dose calculations using GEANT4 and the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Cloud computing allows for vast computational resources to be leveraged quickly and easily in bursts as and when required. Using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and the Amazon Simple Storage Solution, we describe a technique that allows for Monte Carlo radiotherapy dose calculations to be performed using GEANT4 and executed in the cloud. Simulation cost and completion time was evaluated as a function of instance count using compute instances acquired via biding on the Elastic Compute Cloud spot market. Bidding for instances on the instance spot market was found to be 35-60% of the cost of on-demand instances of the same type. Using the technique, we demonstrate the potential usefulness of cloud computing as a solution for rapid Monte Carlo simulation for radiotherapy dose calculation.