Eur. Phys. J. C (2010) 66: 477-492
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-010-1276-8

Special Article - Tools for Experiment and Theory

Fast calculation of HELAS amplitudes using graphics processing unit (GPU)

¹ KEK Theory Center and Sokendai, Tsukuba, 305-0801, Japan
² KEK, Tsukuba, 305-0801, Japan
³ Space and Geophysics Laboratory, Applied Research Laboratories, University of Texas, Austin, TX, 78758, USA
⁴ Department of Physics, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, USA

^* e-mail: junichi.kanzaki@kek.jp

Received: 30 August 2009
Revised: 17 January 2010
Published online: 10 March 2010

Abstract

We use the graphics processing unit (GPU) for fast calculations of helicity amplitudes of physics processes. As our first attempt, we compute (n=2 to 8) processes in pp collisions at  TeV by transferring the MadGraph generated HELAS amplitudes (FORTRAN) into newly developed HEGET (HELAS Evaluation with GPU Enhanced Technology) codes written in CUDA, a C-platform developed by NVIDIA for general purpose computing on the GPU. Compared with the usual CPU programs, we obtain a 40–150 times better performance on the GPU.