No Arabic abstract
The NEMO High Performance Computing Cluster at the University of Freiburg has been made available to researchers of the ATLAS and CMS experiments. Users access the cluster from external machines connected to the World-wide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG). This paper describes how the full software environment of the WLCG is provided in a virtual machine image. The interplay between the schedulers for NEMO and for the external clusters is coordinated through the ROCED service. A cloud computing infrastructure is deployed at NEMO to orchestrate the simultaneous usage by bare metal and virtualized jobs. Through the setup, resources are provided to users in a transparent, automatized, and on-demand way. The performance of the virtualized environment has been evaluated for particle physics applications.
We present MadFlow, a first general multi-purpose framework for Monte Carlo (MC) event simulation of particle physics processes designed to take full advantage of hardware accelerators, in particular, graphics processing units (GPUs). The automation process of generating all the required components for MC simulation of a generic physics process and its deployment on hardware accelerator is still a big challenge nowadays. In order to solve this challenge, we design a workflow and code library which provides to the user the possibility to simulate custom processes through the MadGraph5_aMC@NLO framework and a plugin for the generation and exporting of specialized code in a GPU-like format. The exported code includes analytic expressions for matrix elements and phase space. The simulation is performed using the VegasFlow and PDFFlow libraries which deploy automatically the full simulation on systems with different hardware acceleration capabilities, such as multi-threading CPU, single-GPU and multi-GPU setups. The package also provides an asynchronous unweighted events procedure to store simulation results. Crucially, although only Leading Order is automatized, the library provides all ingredients necessary to build full complex Monte Carlo simulators in a modern, extensible and maintainable way. We show simulation results at leading-order for multiple processes on different hardware configurations.
Significant investments to upgrade and construct large-scale scientific facilities demand commensurate investments in R&D to design algorithms and computing approaches to enable scientific and engineering breakthroughs in the big data era. Innovative Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications have powered transformational solutions for big data challenges in industry and technology that now drive a multi-billion dollar industry, and which play an ever increasing role shaping human social patterns. As AI continues to evolve into a computing paradigm endowed with statistical and mathematical rigor, it has become apparent that single-GPU solutions for training, validation, and testing are no longer sufficient for computational grand challenges brought about by scientific facilities that produce data at a rate and volume that outstrip the computing capabilities of available cyberinfrastructure platforms. This realization has been driving the confluence of AI and high performance computing (HPC) to reduce time-to-insight, and to enable a systematic study of domain-inspired AI architectures and optimization schemes to enable data-driven discovery. In this article we present a summary of recent developments in this field, and describe specific advances that authors in this article are spearheading to accelerate and streamline the use of HPC platforms to design and apply accelerated AI algorithms in academia and industry.
We describe the development of a scientific cloud computing (SCC) platform that offers high performance computation capability. The platform consists of a scientific virtual machine prototype containing a UNIX operating system and several materials science codes, together with essential interface tools (an SCC toolset) that offers functionality comparable to local compute clusters. In particular, our SCC toolset provides automatic creation of virtual clusters for parallel computing, including tools for execution and monitoring performance, as well as efficient I/O utilities that enable seamless connections to and from the cloud. Our SCC platform is optimized for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). We present benchmarks for prototypical scientific applications and demonstrate performance comparable to local compute clusters. To facilitate code execution and provide user-friendly access, we have also integrated cloud computing capability in a JAVA-based GUI. Our SCC platform may be an alternative to traditional HPC resources for materials science or quantum chemistry applications.
New hardware architectures open up immense opportunities for supercomputer simulations. However, programming techniques for different architectures vary significantly, which leads to the necessity of developing and supporting multiple co
A R&D project has been recently launched to investigate Geant4 architectural design in view of addressing new experimental issues in HEP and other related physics disciplines. In the context of this project the use of generic programming techniques besides the conventional object oriented is investigated. Software design features and preliminary results from a new prototype implementation of Geant4 electromagnetic physics are illustrated. Performance evaluations are presented. Issues related to quality assurance in Geant4 physics modelling are discussed.