Abstract
The upcoming generation of exascale HPC machines will all have most of their computing power provided by GPGPU accelerators. In order to be able to take advantage of this class of machines for HEP Monte Carlo simulations, we started to develop a Geant pilot application as a collaboration between HEP and the Exascale Computing Project. We will use this pilot to study and characterize how the machines’ architecture affects performance. The pilot will encapsulate the minimum set of physics and software framework processes necessary to describe a representative HEP simulation problem. The pilot will then be used to exercise communication, computation, and data access patterns. The project’s main objective is to identify re-engineering opportunities that will increase event throughput by improving single node performance and being able to make efficient use of the next generation of accelerators available in Exascale facilities.
Highlights
The upcoming wave of High-Performance Computing supercomputers to be deployed by the Department of Energy (DOE) labs will both bring exciting opportunities and significant challenges
DOE Office of Science’s High Energy Physics (HEP) program is investing towards the use of exascale computing by steering its experimental
Several groups have ported successfully some subset of the Geant4 physics processes used in very specific applications. Those use cases have the particularity that one or a few physics processes are taking a considerable fraction of the execution time of a typical simulation and that have inherently fewer conditional branches
Summary
Several groups have ported successfully some subset of the Geant physics processes used in very specific applications Those use cases have the particularity that one or a few physics processes are taking a considerable fraction of the execution time of a typical simulation and that have inherently fewer conditional branches (this is unlike HEP simulations where there is no such concentration of run-time and where branching is frequent). Compared to those efforts we attempt to tackle the more generic problem. Opticks [9] is a GPU Optical photon simulation for Particle Physics with NVDIA’s OptiX that reports a 200x speedup with mobile GPU (GeForce GT 750M)
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