Geant4 Computing Performance Benchmarking and Monitoring

Journal Article · Wed Dec 23 00:00:00 EST 2015 · Journal of Physics. Conference Series

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-6596/664/6/062021· OSTI ID:1249066

Dotti, Andrea ^[1]; Elvira, V. Daniel ^[2]; Folger, Gunter ^[3]; Genser, Krzysztof ^[2]; Jun, Soon Yung ^[2]; Kowalkowski, James B. ^[2]; Paterno, Marc ^[2]

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1. SLAC National Accelerator Lab., Menlo Park, CA (United States)
2. Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (FNAL), Batavia, IL (United States)
3. European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Geneva (Switzerland)

Performance evaluation and analysis of large scale computing applications is essential for optimal use of resources. As detector simulation is one of the most compute intensive tasks and Geant4 is the simulation toolkit most widely used in contemporary high energy physics (HEP) experiments, it is important to monitor Geant4 through its development cycle for changes in computing performance and to identify problems and opportunities for code improvements. All Geant4 development and public releases are being profiled with a set of applications that utilize different input event samples, physics parameters, and detector configurations. Results from multiple benchmarking runs are compared to previous public and development reference releases to monitor CPU and memory usage. Observed changes are evaluated and correlated with code modifications. Besides the full summary of call stack and memory footprint, a detailed call graph analysis is available to Geant4 developers for further analysis. The set of software tools used in the performance evaluation procedure, both in sequential and multi-threaded modes, include FAST, IgProf and Open|Speedshop. Furthermore, the scalability of the CPU time and memory performance in multi-threaded application is evaluated by measuring event throughput and memory gain as a function of the number of threads for selected event samples.

• Research Organization: SLAC National Accelerator Lab., Menlo Park, CA (United States); Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (FNAL), Batavia, IL (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC), High Energy Physics (HEP)
• Grant/Contract Number: AC02-76SF00515; AC02-07CH11359
• OSTI ID: 1249066
• Alternate ID(s): OSTI ID: 1250779
• Report Number(s): FERMILAB-CONF-15-599-CD
• Journal Information: Journal of Physics. Conference Series, Vol. 664, Issue 6; Conference: 21. International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP2015), Okinawa (Japan), 13-17 Apr 2015; ISSN 1742-6588
• Publisher: IOP Publishing
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING