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Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe GEANT 4 on Large Intel Xeon Phi Clusters : Service Implementation and Performance
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Ilievaa, Nevena Pavlovb, Borislav Petkovb, Peicho Litovb, Leandar |
| Copyright Year | 2017 |
| Abstract | The fast and precise simulation of particle interactions with matter is an important task for several scientific areas, ranging from fundamental science (high-energy physics experiments, astrophysics and astroparticle physics, nuclear investigations) through applied science (radiation protection, space science), to biology and medicine (DNA investigations, hadron therapy, medical physics and medical imaging) and education. The basic software in all these fields is Geant4 (GEometry ANd Tracking) – a platform for simulation of the passage of particles through matter [1]. Along the way towards enabling the execution of Geant4 based simulations on HPC architectures with large clusters of Intel Xeon Phi co-processors as a general service, we study the performance of this software suit on the supercomputer system Avitohol@BAS, commenting on the pitfalls in the installation and compilation process. Some practical scripts are collected in the supplementary material shown in the appendix. INTRODUCTION GEANT4 [1] is a software toolkit for simulation of the interactions of particles with matter. It exploits the objectoriented technology to achieve transparency of the physics implementation, as well as openness to extension and evolution. GEANT4 encompasses a wide set of tools for all the domains of detector simulation, including geometry modelling, detector response, run and event management, tracking, visualization and user interface. An abundant set of physics processes handles the diverse interactions of particles with matter across a wide energy range, as required by GEANT4 multi-disciplinary nature. The GEANT4 source code, libraries and user documentation are freely available [2-4]. GEANT4 is the successor of the FORTRAN-based GEANT series of software toolkits [5], which dates back to 1978. GEANT4 is the first version developed using object oriented technology and is implemented in C++. GEANT4 can be used as a stand-alone tool and linked as a library. For example, in applications like CMSSW [6] (high-energy physics) and GATE [7] (medical physics), GEANT4 is accessed through a complex framework. The HPC approach used is based on GRID technology. The largest research facilities in HEP (high-energy physics) use the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) infrastructure to perform such simulations. In this approach, different computers simulate different events. The events are fully independent, so no data transfer between different computers is needed. The problems along this way are two-fold: • With the increasing data volumes, the resources become more and more insufficient, even with structures like WLCG. • New architectures like those involving large number of Intel Xeon Phi accelerators are not used efficiently by the largest HPC community worldwide. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.prace-ri.eu/IMG/pdf/WP257.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
