Alice Weekly Meeting: Software for Hardware Accelerators
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Europe/Zurich
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10:00 AM
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10:20 AM
Discussion 20mSpeaker: 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.
- 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 deterministic mode issue on AMD Pro 9700 reported by Oliver - Status?
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
- 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.
Other topics:
- Need to bump ONNXRuntime to 1.24, Giulio is checking, needed for ROCm 7.2 - Status?
- Test at NERSC successfull, first results presented at CHEP and LHCP.
- GPU TPC + ITS tracking working nicely on A100 GPU, no backpressure from GPU, but workflow is CPU-bound, as on EPNs.
- For some reasons, the GPUs at NERSC perform much slower than on EPNs (even though both are 64 cores), should be investigated.
EPN GPU Topics:
- Test EPN with RTX 6000 available, started testing yesterday evening, but no results yet.
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10:20 AM
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10:25 AM
TPC ML Clustering 5mSpeaker: Christian Sonnabend (CERN, Heidelberg University (DE))
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10:25 AM
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10:30 AM
GPU Parameter Optimizations 5mSpeaker: Gabriele Cimador (CERN, Università and INFN Torino)
- Fully implemented gpu limits aware version
- Block size: from warp size to max block size
- Blocks per SM: computed as sampled fraction of SM * max_blocks(block_size_sample)
Next steps
- Study interplay of parameters across GPUs
ALICE GPU workload for HEPScore23
- Bumped O2 version in the workload, with newest
tpctransform.dump - This afternoon will meet with Robin
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10:30 AM
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10:35 AM
Efficient Data Structures 5mSpeaker: Dr Oliver Gregor Rietmann (CERN)
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10:35 AM
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10:40 AM
Following up GPU to-dos 5mSpeaker: Dr Vikas Singhal (Department of Atomic Energy (IN))
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10:40 AM
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10:45 AM
TPC Clusterization / OpenCL / Highly Ionizing Particles 5mSpeaker: Felix Weiglhofer (CERN)
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10:50 AM
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10:55 AM
System Run Coordination Topics 5mSpeaker: Ernst Hellbar (CERN)
physics PbPb runs with NN clusterizer successfully taken on Friday
- full NN: 572485
- CF regression: 572486
HIP tail filter
- two short runs taken with filter enabled: 572487, 572488
- TPC QC experts reported tracking performance to be identical with other runs
- Jens want to do a few more check on the Qtot distributions where he sees some differences
- once confirmed by Jens, we should enable the HIP tail filter for the remaining physics runs
OS update on EPNs
- want to update to alma 10 asap during LS3
- need to clarify compatibility of our code and a rocm 7 release
- summary by David during S&C days October 2025
- miscompilation on MI100
- miscompilation with RTC+dEdx enabled
- another miscompilation with RTC disabled
- 1.5 % performance penalty
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10:00 AM
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10:20 AM
