Kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) simulations are used to simulate epitaxial crystal growth. Presently, the fastest reported methods use binary trees to search through a list of rates in $O\left({\log }_{2}M\right)$ time, where M is the number of rates. These methods are applicable to an arbitrary set of rates, but typical KMC bond-counting schemes involve only a finite set of distinct rates. This allows one to construct a faster list-based algorithm with a computation time that is essentially independent of M. It is found that this algorithm typically reduces computation time by between 30% and 50% for typical simulations, with this factor increasing for larger simulations.

• Received 25 June 2001

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.65.036704