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Title: Parallelized Kalman-Filter-Based Reconstruction of Particle Tracks on Many-Core Processors and GPUs

Conference · · EPJ Web Conf.

For over a decade now, physical and energy constraints have limited clock speed improvements in commodity microprocessors. Instead, chipmakers have been pushed into producing lower-power, multi-core processors such as Graphical Processing Units (GPU), ARM CPUs, and Intel MICs. Broad-based efforts from manufacturers and developers have been devoted to making these processors user-friendly enough to perform general computations. However, extracting performance from a larger number of cores, as well as specialized vector or SIMD units, requires special care in algorithm design and code optimization. One of the most computationally challenging problems in high-energy particle experiments is finding and fitting the charged-particle tracks during event reconstruction. This is expected to become by far the dominant problem at the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC), for example. Today the most common track finding methods are those based on the Kalman filter. Experience with Kalman techniques on real tracking detector systems has shown that they are robust and provide high physics performance. This is why they are currently in use at the LHC, both in the trigger and offine. Previously we reported on the significant parallel speedups that resulted from our investigations to adapt Kalman filters to track fitting and track building on Intel Xeon and Xeon Phi. Here, we discuss our progresses toward the understanding of these processors and the new developments to port the Kalman filter to NVIDIA GPUs.

Research Organization:
Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (FNAL), Batavia, IL (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC), High Energy Physics (HEP)
DOE Contract Number:
AC02-07CH11359
OSTI ID:
1423257
Report Number(s):
arXiv:1705.02876; FERMILAB-CONF-17-423-CD; 1598465
Journal Information:
EPJ Web Conf., Vol. 150; Conference: Connecting The Dots / Intelligent Tracker, Orsay, France, 03/06-03/09/2017
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

References (7)

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Observation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC journal September 2012
Kalman-Filter-based particle tracking on parallel architectures at Hadron Colliders conference October 2015
First evaluation of the CPU, GPGPU and MIC architectures for real time particle tracking based on Hough transform at the LHC journal April 2014