English

Deploying a Hybrid PVFinder Algorithm for Primary Vertex Reconstruction in LHCb's GPU-Resident HLT1

High Energy Physics - Experiment 2026-02-24 v1

Abstract

LHCb's Run 3 upgrade introduced a fully software-based trigger system operating at 30~MHz, processing an average of 5.6 proton-proton collision vertices per bunch crossing (event). This work presents the development of an inference engine for PVFinder, a hybrid deep neural network for finding primary vertices, the proton-proton collision points from which all subsequent particle decays originate into Allen, LHCb's High Level Trigger (HLT1) framework. The integration addresses critical real-time constraints including fixed memory pools, single-stream execution, and sub-400~μ\mus per-event processing budgets on NVIDIA GPUs. We introduce a translation layer that bridges Allen's Structure-of-Arrays (SoA) data layout with cuDNN's tensor format while maintaining zero-copy semantics and deterministic behavior. Current performance shows the CNN stage contributes significant throughput overhead. We present a roadmap targeting order-of-magnitude improvements through mixed-precision computing, model compression and other techniques.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.19959,
  title  = {Deploying a Hybrid PVFinder Algorithm for Primary Vertex Reconstruction in LHCb's GPU-Resident HLT1},
  author = {Simon Akar and Mohamed Elashri and Conor Henderson and Michael Sokoloff},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.19959},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Contribution to the proceedings of the Connecting the Dots Workshop