Adapting the serial Alpgen event generator to simulate LHC collisions on millions of parallel threads

TL;DR

This paper describes how the Alpgen event generator was adapted from a serial application to a highly parallel version to efficiently simulate LHC collisions on supercomputers, addressing increasing computational demands.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel adaptation of Alpgen for large-scale parallel computing on Mira, enabling more efficient LHC collision simulations at high energies.

Findings

Successful parallelization of Alpgen on Mira supercomputer

Significant performance improvements in event generation

Enhanced capacity to simulate high-energy LHC collisions

Abstract

As the LHC moves to higher energies and luminosity, the demand for computing resources increases accordingly and will soon outpace the growth of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid. To meet this greater demand, event generation Monte Carlo was targeted for adaptation to run on Mira, the supercomputer at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. Alpgen is a Monte Carlo event generation application that is used by LHC experiments in the simulation of collisions that take place in the Large Hadron Collider. This paper details the process by which Alpgen was adapted from a single-processor serial-application to a large-scale parallel-application and the performance that was achieved.