GPGPU for track finding in High Energy Physics

Abstract

The LHC experiments are designed to detect large amount of physics events produced with a very high rate. Considering the future upgrades, the data acquisition rate will become even higher and new computing paradigms must be adopted for fast data-processing: General Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU) is a novel approach based on massive parallel computing. The intense computation power provided by Graphics Processing Units (GPU) is expected to reduce the computation time and to speed-up the low-latency applications used for fast decision taking. In particular, this approach could be hence used for high-level triggering in very complex environments, like the typical inner tracking systems of the multi-purpose experiments at LHC, where a large number of charged particle tracks will be produced with the luminosity upgrade. In this article we discuss a track pattern recognition algorithm based on the Hough Transform, where a parallel approach is expected to reduce dramatically the execution time.