Design and engineering of a simplified workflow execution for the MG5aMC event generator on GPUs and vector CPUs
This work addresses performance bottlenecks for high energy physics experiments, particularly for the HL-LHC program, but is incremental as it focuses on porting and optimizing an existing generator.
The paper tackles the challenge of improving the performance of the Madgraph5_aMC@NLO physics event generator on modern hardware like GPUs and vector CPUs, with ongoing efforts to reengineer it for efficient execution, though concrete results are preliminary and not quantified.
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.