PDFFlow: hardware accelerating parton density access
This work addresses the bottleneck of slow parton distribution function evaluation for particle physics calculations, particularly benefiting Monte Carlo simulations.
PDFFlow is a new software designed for fast evaluation of parton distribution functions (PDFs) on hardware accelerators. It extends and implements interpolation algorithms using Google's TensorFlow library, enabling PDF evaluations to fully leverage multi-threading CPU and GPU setups.
We present PDFFlow, a new software for fast evaluation of parton distribution functions (PDFs) designed for platforms with hardware accelerators. PDFs are essential for the calculation of particle physics observables through Monte Carlo simulation techniques. The evaluation of a generic set of PDFs for quarks and gluons at a given momentum fraction and energy scale requires the implementation of interpolation algorithms as introduced for the first time by the LHAPDF project. PDFFlow extends and implements these interpolation algorithms using Google's TensorFlow library providing the possibility to perform PDF evaluations taking fully advantage of multi-threading CPU and GPU setups. We benchmark the performance of this library on multiple scenarios relevant for the particle physics community.