The Geometry Description Markup Language (GDML) is a specialized XML-based language designed as an application-independent persistent format for describing the geometries of detectors associated with ...physics measurements. It serves to implement "geometry trees" which correspond to the hierarchy of volumes a detector geometry can be composed of, and to allow to identify the position of individual solids, as well as to describe the materials they are made of. Being pure XML, GDML can be universally used, and in particular it can be considered as the format for interchanging geometries among different applications. In this paper we will present the current status of the development of GDML. After having discussed the contents of the latest GDML schema, which is the basic definition of the format, we will concentrate on the GDML processors. We will present the latest implementation of the GDML "writers" as well as "readers" for either Geant4 , or ROOT ,
Abstract
Making general particle transport simulation for high-energy physics (HEP) single-instruction-multiple-thread (SIMT) friendly, to take advantage of accelerator hardware, is an important ...alternative for boosting the throughput of simulation applications. To date, this challenge is not yet resolved, due to difficulties in mapping the complexity of Geant4 components and workflow to the massive parallelism features exposed by graphics processing units (GPU). The AdePT project is one of the R&D initiatives tackling this limitation and exploring GPUs as potential accelerators for offloading some part of the CPU simulation workload. Our main target is to implement a complete electromagnetic shower demonstrator working on the GPU. The project is the first to create a full prototype of a realistic electron, positron, and gamma electromagnetic shower simulation on GPU, implemented as either a standalone application or as an extension of the standard Geant4 CPU workflow. Our prototype currently provides a platform to explore many optimisations and different approaches. We present the most recent results and initial conclusions of our work, using both a standalone GPU performance analysis and a first implementation of a hybrid workflow based on Geant4 on the CPU and AdePT on the GPU.
The current status of the Geant4 toolkit and the recent developments for the geometry, electromagnetic and hadronic physics for medium and high energy are presented. The focus of many recent ...improvements of the toolkit are key applications including the simulation of large Hadron collider (LHC) experiments at CERN. These developments and physics model extensions provide new capabilities and improvements for other applications of the toolkit for radiation studies in high energy physics (HEP), space and medical research.
In the fall 2016, GeantV went through a thorough community evaluation of the project status and of its strategy for sharing the R&D results with the LHC experiments and with the HEP simulation ...community in general. Following this discussion, GeantV has engaged onto an ambitious 2-year road-path aiming to deliver a beta version that has most of the final design and several performance features of the final product, partially integrated with some of the experiment's frameworks. The initial GeantV prototype has been updated to a vector-aware concurrent framework, which is able to deliver high-density floating-point computations for most of the performance-critical components such as propagation in field and physics models. Electromagnetic physics models were adapted for the specific GeantV requirements, aiming for the full demonstration of shower physics performance in the alpha release at the end of 2017. We have revisited and formalized GeantV user interfaces and helper protocols, allowing to: connect to user code, provide recipes to access efficiently MC truth and generate user data in a concurrent environment.
Comparison between Geant4, Fluka and the TileCal test-beam data Cascella, M.; Gallas, M.; Pokorski, W. ...
Nuclear instruments & methods in physics research. Section A, Accelerators, spectrometers, detectors and associated equipment,
05/2010, Letnik:
617, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
We present a study of the signal produced by charged pions of energies ranging between 20 and 350
GeV in modules of ATLAS tile calorimeter. The results from test beam data are compared to the ...predictions of different Monte Carlo simulations (Geant4 and Fluka). The goal is to assess in a quantitative way how well different Monte Carlo codes can reproduce the distribution of visible energy in the calorimeter and the details of the hadronic shower.
Detector simulation is consuming at least half of the HEP computing cycles, and even so, experiments have to take hard decisions on what to simulate, as their needs greatly surpass the availability ...of computing resources. New experiments still in the design phase such as FCC, CLIC and ILC as well as upgraded versions of the existing LHC detectors will push further the simulation requirements. Since the increase in computing resources is not likely to keep pace with our needs, it is therefore necessary to explore innovative ways of speeding up simulation in order to sustain the progress of High Energy Physics. The GeantV project aims at developing a high performance detector simulation system integrating fast and full simulation that can be ported on different computing architectures, including CPU accelerators. After more than two years of R&D the project has produced a prototype capable of transporting particles in complex geometries exploiting micro-parallelism, SIMD and multithreading. Portability is obtained via C++ template techniques that allow the development of machine- independent computational kernels. A set of tables derived from Geant4 for cross sections and final states provides a realistic shower development and, having been ported into a Geant4 physics list, can be used as a basis for a direct performance comparison.
An intensive R&D and programming effort is required to accomplish new challenges posed by future experimental high-energy particle physics (HEP) programs. The GeantV project aims to narrow the gap ...between the performance of the existing HEP detector simulation software and the ideal performance achievable, exploiting latest advances in computing technology. The project has developed a particle detector simulation prototype capable of transporting in parallel particles in complex geometries exploiting instruction level microparallelism (SIMD and SIMT), task-level parallelism (multithreading) and high-level parallelism (MPI), leveraging both the multi-core and the many-core opportunities. We present preliminary verification results concerning the electromagnetic (EM) physics models developed for parallel computing architectures within the GeantV project. In order to exploit the potential of vectorization and accelerators and to make the physics model effectively parallelizable, advanced sampling techniques have been implemented and tested. In this paper we introduce a set of automated statistical tests in order to verify the vectorized models by checking their consistency with the corresponding Geant4 models and to validate them against experimental data.
GeantV Amadio, G.; Ananya, A.; Apostolakis, J. ...
Computing and software for big science,
12/2021, Letnik:
5, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Odprti dostop
Full detector simulation was among the largest CPU consumers in all CERN experiment software stacks for the first two runs of the Large Hadron Collider. In the early 2010s, it was projected that ...simulation demands would scale linearly with increasing luminosity, with only partial compensation from increasing computing resources. The extension of fast simulation approaches to cover more use cases that represent a larger fraction of the simulation budget is only part of the solution, because of intrinsic precision limitations. The remainder corresponds to speeding up the simulation software by several factors, which is not achievable by just applying simple optimizations to the current code base. In this context, the GeantV R&D project was launched, aiming to redesign the legacy particle transport code in order to benefit from features of fine-grained parallelism, including vectorization and increased locality of both instruction and data. This paper provides an extensive presentation of the results and achievements of this R&D project, as well as the conclusions and lessons learned from the beta version prototype.
GeantV is a complex system based on the interaction of different modules needed for detector simulation, which include transport of particles in fields, physics models simulating their interactions ...with matter and a geometrical modeler library for describing the detector and locating the particles and computing the path length to the current volume boundary. The GeantV project is recasting the classical simulation approach to get maximum benefit from SIMD/MIMD computational architectures and highly massive parallel systems. This involves finding the appropriate balance between several aspects influencing computational performance (floating-point performance, usage of off-chip memory bandwidth, specification of cache hierarchy, etc.) and handling a large number of program parameters that have to be optimized to achieve the best simulation throughput. This optimization task can be treated as a black-box optimization problem, which requires searching the optimum set of parameters using only point-wise function evaluations. The goal of this study is to provide a mechanism for optimizing complex systems (high energy physics particle transport simulations) with the help of genetic algorithms and evolution strategies as tuning procedures for massive parallel simulations. One of the described approaches is based on introducing a specific multivariate analysis operator that could be used in case of resource expensive or time consuming evaluations of fitness functions, in order to speed-up the convergence of the black-box optimization problem.
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