10–14 Oct 2016
San Francisco Marriott Marquis
America/Los_Angeles timezone

Multi-threaded Geant4 on Intel Many Integrated Core architectures

11 Oct 2016, 14:15
15m
GG A+B (San Francisco Mariott Marquis)

GG A+B

San Francisco Mariott Marquis

Oral Track 5: Software Development Track 5: Software Development

Speaker

Andrea Dotti (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (US))

Description

In the midst of the multi- and many-core era, the computing models employed by
HEP experiments are evolving to embrace the trends of new hardware technologies.
As the computing needs of present and future HEP experiments -particularly those
at the Large Hadron Collider- grow, adoption of many-core architectures and
highly-parallel programming models is essential to prevent degradation in scientific capability.

Simulation of particle interactions is typically a major consumer of CPU
resources in HEP experiments. The recent release of a highly performant
multi-threaded version of Geant4 opens the door for experiments to fully take
advantage of highly-parallel technologies.

The Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture of Intel, known as the Xeon Phi
family of products, provide a platform for highly-parallel applications. Their large
number of cores and Linux-based environment make them an attractive compromise
between conventional CPUs and general-purpose GPUs. Xeon Phi processors will be
appearing in next-generation supercomputers such as Cori Phase 2 at NERSC.

To prepare for tusing hese next-generation supercomputers, a Geant4 application
has been developed to test and study HEP particle simulations on the MIC Intel architectures (HepExpMT).
This application serves as a demonstrator of the feasibility and
computing-opportunity of utilizing this advanced architecture with a complex
detector geometry.

We have measured the performances of the application on the first generation of Xeon Phi
coprocessors (code name Knights Corner, KNC). In this work we extend the scalability measurements to the second generation of Xeon Phi architectures (code name Knights Landing, KNL) in
preparation of further testing on Cori Phase 2 supercomputer at NERSC.

Primary Keyword (Mandatory) High performance computing
Secondary Keyword (Optional) Simulation
Tertiary Keyword (Optional) Parallelization

Primary authors

Andrea Dotti (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (US)) Makoto Asai (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (US)) Steven Andrew Farrell (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (US))

Presentation materials