https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-021-09443-8
Special Article - Tools for Experiment and Theory
MadFlow: automating Monte Carlo simulation on GPU for particle physics processes
1
TIF Lab, Dipartimento di Fisica, Università degli Studi di Milano and INFN Sezione di Milano, Milan, Italy
2
CERN Theoretical Physics Department and OpenLab, 1211, Geneva 23, Switzerland
3
Quantum Research Centre, Technology Innovation Institute, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Received:
18
June
2021
Accepted:
10
July
2021
Published online:
27
July
2021
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.
© The Author(s) 2021
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Funded by SCOAP3
