Generalizing mkFit and its Application to HL-LHC

TL;DR

This paper discusses the mkFit algorithm's deployment in CMS for HL-LHC, highlighting its speed improvements, generalization to new geometries, and potential for broader detector applications.

Contribution

The paper introduces a generalized geometry description for mkFit, enabling support for HL-LHC tracker geometry and other configurations, with detailed implementation strategies.

Findings

Average speedup of 3.5x in track pattern recognition

Effective vectorization using icc and gcc compilers

Generalized geometry supports HL-LHC tracker and other detectors

Abstract

mkFit is an implementation of the Kalman filter-based track reconstruction algorithm that exploits both thread- and data-level parallelism. In the past few years the project transitioned from the R&D phase to deployment in the Run-3 offline workflow of the CMS experiment. The CMS tracking performs a series of iterations, targeting reconstruction of tracks of increasing difficulty after removing hits associated to tracks found in previous iterations. mkFit has been adopted for several of the tracking iterations, which contribute to the majority of reconstructed tracks. When tested in the standard conditions for production jobs, speedups in track pattern recognition are on average of the order of 3.5x for the iterations where it is used (3-7x depending on the iteration). Multiple factors contribute to the observed speedups, including vectorization and a lightweight geometry description, as well as improved memory management and single precision. Efficient vectorization is achieved with both the icc and the gcc (default in CMSSW) compilers and relies on a dedicated library for small matrix operations, Matriplex, which has recently been released in a public repository. While the mkFit geometry description already featured levels of abstraction from the actual Phase-1 CMS tracker, several components of the implementations were still tied to that specific geometry. We have further generalized the geometry description and the configuration of the run-time parameters, in order to enable support for the Phase-2 upgraded tracker geometry for the HL-LHC and potentially other detector configurations. The implementation strategy and high-level code changes required for the HL-LHC geometry are presented. Speedups in track building from mkFit imply that track fitting becomes a comparably time consuming step of the tracking chain.