A GPU-based Kalman Filter for Track Fitting

TL;DR

This paper presents a GPU-accelerated Kalman filter implementation for track fitting in high-energy physics, demonstrating significant performance improvements over CPU-based methods using CUDA and the ACTS toolkit.

Contribution

It introduces a novel GPU-based Kalman filter implementation for track fitting in HEP, detailing the parallelization approach and performance benchmarking results.

Findings

GPU implementation shows substantial speedup over CPU.

Parallelization effectively leverages GPU architecture.

Performance gains enable more efficient data processing.

Abstract

Computing centres, including those used to process High-Energy Physics data and simulations, are increasingly providing significant fractions of their computing resources through hardware architectures other than x86 CPUs, with GPUs being a common alternative. GPUs can provide excellent computational performance at a good price point for tasks that can be suitably parallelized. Charged particle (track) reconstruction is a computationally expensive component of HEP data reconstruction, and thus needs to use available resources in an efficient way. In this paper, an implementation of Kalman filter-based track fitting using CUDA and running on GPUs is presented. This utilizes the ACTS (A Common Tracking Software) toolkit; an open source and experiment-independent toolkit for track reconstruction. The implementation details and parallelization approach are described, along with the specific challenges for such an implementation. Detailed performance benchmarking results are discussed, which show encouraging performance gains over a CPU-based implementation for representative configurations. Finally, a perspective on the challenges and future directions for these studies is outlined. These include more complex and realistic scenarios which can be studied, and anticipated developments to software frameworks and standards which may open up possibilities for greater flexibility and improved performance.