Highly Ionizing Particles
 
- Noisy pad filter already scans TPC pads along time axis, but neighboring pads processed in parallel
- Need seperate step that filters HIP tails beforehand
 
 
GPU CI
 

1. Orchestrate the access of ALICE to the CERN NGT benchmark/development hardware, and alternatively to other CERN resources, to benchmark the ALICE GPU code on modern / new GPUs.


  • NGT Documentation: https://ngt.docs.cern.ch/getting-started/
  • Gives us access to H100, already supports Github runners
  • Need variant of O2 build container with CUDA driver to run GPU tests.


2. Establish a software infrastructure / scripts, to run the ALICE GPU processing benchmarks on CPUs and GPUs over different data set, and provide performance results in a way that enables further analysis.
  - In principle the standalone benchmark should be enough, but pp and Pb-Pb data sets of different interaction rates should be tested.
3. Extend the Alice O2 CI infrastructure to run actual code on the GPU, check for correctness and performance, for pull requests.
  - Should be a fast test for the CI. The standalone benchmark should be enough. Ideally we can perhaps use the deterministic mode, to validate results between CPU and GPU.
4. Establish automated continuous benchmarking, to monitor the evolution of the GPU processing performance per O2 version.
  - We already have/had such  benchmarking on the alibi server with some old GPUs. But this should be extended, we need to use more modern GPUs, and we need monitoring and alerting.