GeantV — Path Towards High-Performance Detector Simulation

Abstract

Geant is a toolkit for simulating the passage of particles through matter. It is used at the LHC to simulate particles emerging from beam collisions, and played a key role in the discovery of the Higgs boson. The current production version of Geant was developed at a time when C++ had no templates and most processing happened on single-core machines. In order to deal with the increasing demand for simulated data by the LHC, the GeantV project began an R&D effort to harness the massive parallelism available in modern hardware such as the Xeon Phi and programmable GPUs, while also improving the quality of physics simulation as much as possible. After three years of work, the project has produced a prototype capable of transporting particles in complex geometries exploiting SIMD and multithreading parallelism. Performance benchmarks and physics validation tests show that we are on the right path towards high-performance simulation.

Authors

• G. Amadio (UNESP)
• Ananya (CERN)
• J. Apostolakis (CERN)
• A. Arora (CERN)
• M. Bandieramonte (CERN)
• A. Bhattacharyya (BARC)
• C. Bianchini (UNESP)
• R. Brun (CERN)
• P. Canal (FNAL)
• F. Carminati (CERN)
• L. Duhem (Intel)
• D. Elvira (FNAL)
• A. Gheata (CERN)
• M. Gheata (CERN)
• I. Goulas (CERN)
• F. Hariri (CERN)
• R. L. Iope (UNESP)
• S. Y. Jun (FNAL)
• H. Kumawat (BARC)
• G. Lima (FNAL)
• A. Mohanty (BARC)
• T. Nikitina (CERN)
• M. Novak (CERN)
• W. Pokorski (CERN)
• A. Ribon (CERN)
• R. Sehgal (BARC)
• O. Shadura (CERN)
• S. Vallecorsa (CERN)
• S. Wenzel (CERN)
• Y. Zhang (CERN)