Andrea Valassi

Andrea Valassi, Stefan Roiser, Olivier Mattelaer et al.

Physics event generators are essential components of the data analysis software chain of high energy physics experiments, and important consumers of their CPU resources. Improving the software performance of these packages on modern hardware architectures, such as those deployed at HPC centers, is essential in view of the upcoming HL-LHC physics programme. In this paper, we describe an ongoing activity to reengineer the Madgraph5_aMC@NLO physics event generator, primarily to port it and allow its efficient execution on GPUs, but also to modernize it and optimize its performance on vector CPUs. We describe the motivation, engineering process and software architecture design of our developments, as well as the current challenges and future directions for this project. This paper is based on our submission to vCHEP2021 in March 2021,complemented with a few preliminary results that we presented during the conference. Further details and updated results will be given in later publications.

Andrea Valassi

HEP event selection is traditionally considered a binary classification problem, involving the dichotomous categories of signal and background. In distribution fits for particle masses or couplings, however, signal events are not all equivalent, as the signal differential cross section has different sensitivities to the measured parameter in different regions of phase space. In this paper, I describe a mathematical framework for the evaluation and optimization of HEP parameter fits, where this sensitivity is defined on an event-by-event basis, and for MC events it is modeled in terms of their MC weight derivatives with respect to the measured parameter. Minimising the statistical error on a measurement implies the need to resolve (i.e. separate) events with different sensitivities, which ultimately represents a non-dichotomous classification problem. Since MC weight derivatives are not available for real data, the practical strategy I suggest consists in training a regressor of weight derivatives against MC events, and then using it as an optimal partitioning variable for 1-dimensional fits of data events. This CHEP2019 paper is an extension of the study presented at CHEP2018: in particular, event-by-event sensitivities allow the exact computation of the "FIP" ratio between the Fisher information obtained from an analysis and the maximum information that could possibly be obtained with an ideal detector. Using this expression, I discuss the relationship between FIP and two metrics commonly used in Meteorology (Brier score and MSE), and the importance of "sharpness" both in HEP and in that domain. I finally point out that HEP distribution fits should be optimized and evaluated using probabilistic metrics (like FIP or MSE), whereas ranking metrics (like AUC) or threshold metrics (like accuracy) are of limited relevance for these specific problems.