Alice Weekly Meeting: Software for Hardware Accelerators

Wednesday Apr 8, 2026, 10:00 AM → 11:30 AM Europe/Zurich

10:00 AM → 10:20 AM Discussion

Speaker: David Rohr (CERN)

Color code: (critical, news from this week: blue, news from last week: purple, no news: black)

Sync reconstruction

 

Async reconstruction

• Need to investigate short GPU stall problem.
• Limiting factor for pp workflow is now the TPC time series, which is to slow and creates backpressure (costs ~20% performance on EPNs). Enabled multi-threading as recommended by Matthias - need to check if it works.
• Test with GPU GRID jobs at NERSC pending.
• Will tune existing 16-core settings, add a SITEARCH for 16core CPU, and 16coreCPU + generic NVIDIA / AMD GPU, like for 8 core.
• Will retune EPN async workflow for TPC + ITS on GPU on 2025 data.

 

GPU ROCm / compiler topics:

• Problem with building ONNXRuntime with MigraphX support.
• Need to find a way to build ONNXRuntime with support for CUDA and for ROCm.
• Try to find a better solution for the problem with __device__ inline functions leaking symbols in the host code.
  
• Need to check ROCm 7.2 corrtecness.
• Need to understand and fix crash on RTX Pro 6000 reported by Oliver.
• Need to understand deterministic mode issue on AMD Pro 9700 reported by Oliver.
• Understand deterministic mode issue on NVIDIA Blackwell.
• Performance issue on Blackwell fixed (see below).

 

TPC / GPU Processing 

• WIP: Use alignas() or find a better solution to fix alignment of monte carlo labels: https://its.cern.ch/jira/browse/O2-5314
• Waiting for TPC to fix bogus TPC transformations for good, then we can revert the workaround.
• Final solution: merging transformation maps on the fly into a single flat object:
  • Maps now yielding correct results, but 1.5x performance regression running on GPUs.
  • PR is now green in the CI, POD version of the fasttransform and merging of the maps integrated (thanks to Ruben and Matthias and of course Sergey!)
  • Remaining regression with the new maps vs old maps is due to reduced L2 cache hit rate (to be understood why, perhaps larger metadata?).
    • This is compensated when the maps are merged since we query only 1 map, but could still be improved.
    • Discussing with Sergey why new version is worse with respect to cache, Sergey is interested in reproducing and improving it.
    • If we still want to change it, I would wait with merging, since otherwise we need yet another compatibility layer to load maps that were created in between.
  • On MI50, still miscompiles when RTC and dEdx are enabled.
  • New code without RTC is 14% faster than old code with RTC on MI50.
  • New maps fix performance issues on new NVIDIA GPUs. 4090 is roughly 3x faster (with RTC vs with RTC).
• Need to check the problem with ONNX external memory allocator.
• Next high priority topic: Improvements for cluster sharing and cluster attachment at lower TPC pad rows. PR: https://github.com/AliceO2Group/AliceO2/pull/14542
• Check for unnecessary f64 instructions in GPU code.
• Want to retune NVIDIA Blackwell after the performance issue was fixed, and manually look what can be optimized, to get a first realistic estimate how many GPUs we need.
• Working on some improvements for general GPU code and TPC POD Fast Transform: get rid of defines, use constexpr; unify multiply defined constants, and use global GPU constants in FastTransform, move TPCFastTransformGeo to GPU constant memory.
• Matthias is working to get rid of FlatObject dependency in FastTransform splines, will reduce memory foorprint slightly and hopefully improve cache efficiency.

 

Other topics:

• Need to bump ONNXRuntime to 1.24, Giulio is checking, needed for ROCm 7.2 - Status?
• Test at NERSC still ongoing, all jobs so far failed for non-gpu related reasons. Currently jobs in wait till 6d.

 

EPN GPU Topics:

 

10:20 AM → 10:25 AM TPC ML Clustering

Speaker: Christian Sonnabend (CERN, Heidelberg University (DE))

Cluster error parameterization

 

• Test optimization on default cluster error mode with scaling
• Best parameters found within bounds:
  • scaleChiY1: 1.7779086962105004
  • scaleChiY2: 0.5157460329068477
  • scaleChiY3:1.343090130640468
  • scaleChiZ1: 1.0739495259708887
  • scaleChiZ2: 0.5274259679551516
  • scaleChiZ3: 1.1181900592137066
• The "improvement": +0.15% efficiency, +0.2% clone-rate, -0.5% fake-rate
• All of them around bound by [0.5,2.0] by the optimization bounds

 

Reminder (GPUTPCGMPropagator.h)

That means: E.g. strongest change: scaleChiY2 and scaleChZ2 -> even a factor of ~2 does not change the behaviour of the tracking much. Suspected reason: chi2 of 9 for a cluster must be an extreme outlier -> Cluster is far away and probably not track-attached in the first place so cut only takes effect when scaling factor (e.g. scaleChi*) is large

10:25 AM → 10:30 AM GPU Parameter Optimizations

Speaker: Gabriele Cimador (CERN, Università and INFN Torino)

Tuning polishing almost ready

• Auto detects GPU vendors
• Installs all dependencies in a separate python environment (expect profiler)
• README with instructions in progress
• Idea to set a desired duration of the tuning and set number of iterations based on that

 

Accepted talk on ALICE experience with GPUs at workshop on computing of INFN (11-15 May)

• Will contact Maxim for slides on GPU usage & monitoring on the GRID

10:30 AM → 10:35 AM Efficient Data Structures

Speaker: Dr Oliver Gregor Rietmann (CERN)

 

NextGenTrigger Task 1.7

• CHEP talk together with Jolly got accepted.
• Co-Supervision of a summer student. Topic: Imrpove clustering algorithm CLUE.

Implement NGT SoA Code in O2 standalone benchmark

• Working on this fork of the AliceO2 repo, with a CI pipeline:
  • Running on NGT hardware with 4 different GPUs (Nvidia and AMD)
  • Extended CI-pipline to fail if GPU.out changes
• Implemented SoA in:
  
  • SectorTracker
    • GPUTPCBaseTrackParam
    • GPUTPCTrackParam
    • GPUTPCTracklet
    • GPUTPCTrack
• Benchmarking:
  • Two independent measurements for each of the 4 NGT GPUs (standlaone + profiler)
  • Integrated in CI-pipeline with a comparison to the unaltered code
  • Results are now much more consistent, at least with the profiler
• Ran all the benchmarks with and without monitoring: results looked very consistent.
• Next Steps:
  • Build and run O2 with C++26 compiler to integrate reflections (needed for CHEP benchmark) 
  • Write minimal reproducer for the (weird) behavior I observed with AMD W7900 and custom .par file.
  • Make better use of SoA to improve performance
  • Try David's suggestion

10:35 AM → 10:40 AM Following up GPU to-dos

Speaker: Dr Vikas Singhal (Department of Atomic Energy (IN))

10:40 AM → 10:45 AM TPC Clusterization / OpenCL / Highly Ionizing Particles

Speaker: Felix Weiglhofer (CERN)

10:45 AM → 10:50 AM ITS Tracking

Speakers: Felix Schlepper (CERN, Heidelberg University (DE)), Gabriele Cimador (CERN, Università and INFN Torino), Matteo Concas (CERN)

Felix: no news

10:50 AM → 10:55 AM System Run Coordination Topics

Speaker: Ernst Hellbar (CERN)