English

PDFFlow: hardware accelerating parton density access

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2020-12-16 v1 Machine Learning Computational Physics

Abstract

We present PDFFlow, a new software for fast evaluation of parton distribution functions (PDFs) designed for platforms with hardware accelerators. PDFs are essential for the calculation of particle physics observables through Monte Carlo simulation techniques. The evaluation of a generic set of PDFs for quarks and gluons at a given momentum fraction and energy scale requires the implementation of interpolation algorithms as introduced for the first time by the LHAPDF project. PDFFlow extends and implements these interpolation algorithms using Google's TensorFlow library providing the possibility to perform PDF evaluations taking fully advantage of multi-threading CPU and GPU setups. We benchmark the performance of this library on multiple scenarios relevant for the particle physics community.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2012.08221,
  title  = {PDFFlow: hardware accelerating parton density access},
  author = {Marco Rossi and Stefano Carrazza and Juan M. Cruz-Martinez},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.08221},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

6 pages, 6 figures. Code available at "https://github.com/N3PDF/pdfflow". Refer also to arXiv:2009.06635