Making extreme computations possible with virtual machines

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to translate high-energy physics scattering amplitudes into byte-code for virtual machines, significantly reducing library size and improving scalability, with potential for efficient GPU implementation.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach to encode scattering amplitudes as byte-code, enabling more compact storage and scalable interpretation compared to traditional compiled code.

Findings

Byte-code reduces amplitude library size by an order of magnitude.

The virtual machine achieves runtimes comparable to compiled code.

The approach scales better with additional process legs.

Abstract

State-of-the-art algorithms generate scattering amplitudes for high-energy physics at leading order for high-multiplicity processes as compiled code (in Fortran, C or C++). For complicated processes the size of these libraries can become tremendous (many GiB). We show that amplitudes can be translated to byte-code instructions, which even reduce the size by one order of magnitude. The byte-code is interpreted by a Virtual Machine with runtimes comparable to compiled code and a better scaling with additional legs. We study the properties of this algorithm, as an extension of the Optimizing Matrix Element Generator (O'Mega). The bytecode matrix elements are available as alternative input for the event generator WHIZARD. The bytecode interpreter can be implemented very compactly, which will help with a future implementation on massively parallel GPUs.