Investigation of heterogeneous computing platforms for real-time data analysis in the CBM experiment

Abstract

Future experiments in high-energy physics will pose stringent requirements to computing, in particular to real-time data processing. As an example, the CBM experiment at FAIR Germany intends to perform online data selection exclusively in software, without using any hardware trigger, at extreme interaction rates of up to 10 MHz. In this article, we describe how heterogeneous computing platforms, Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) and CPUs, can be used to solve the associated computing problems on the example of the first-level event selection process sensitive to J/ψ decays using muon detectors. We investigate and compare pure parallel computing paradigms (Posix Thread, OpenMP, MPI) and heterogeneous parallel computing paradigms (CUDA, OpenCL) on both CPU and GPU architectures and demonstrate that the problem under consideration can be accommodated with a moderate deployment of hardware resources, provided their compute power is made optimal use of. In addition, we compare OpenCL and pure parallel computing paradigms on CPUs and show that OpenCL can be considered as a single parallel paradigm for all hardware resources.