arXiv subjects

Peter Elmer

Publications and source records attributed to Peter Elmer.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

AI Acceleration of Muon Collider R&D: A Report from the AI4MuC Workshop

A Muon Collider is one of the most attractive routes to multi-TeV lepton collisions, but it requires the accelerator and detector communities to solve a tightly coupled set of problems that have no close precedent in an operating collider. Muons must be produced, captured, cooled, accelerated, and collided before they decay. The detector must then extract clean physics from an environment dominated by decay products from the beamline. Artificial intelligence is not a substitute for accelerator physics, detector design, or engineering validation. It is, however, unusually well matched to several of the central obstacles: high-dimensional design spaces, expensive simulations, coupled subsystem trade-offs, and workflows that are currently too slow or too fragile to support broad design exploration. This report distills the AI4MuC workshop into a summary of AI use cases with the potential to change the pace of Muon Collider R&D, organized around the following physics bottlenecks: muon production and capture, ionization cooling, magnet and RF technology, detector design in beam-induced background, background simulation and generation, reconstruction, and software.

physics.acc-ph↗

arXiv2026

Reconfigurable On-Chip AI for Particle Physics Detectors with Logic Neural Networks

On-device machine learning is increasingly important in applications where extreme data rates or resource constraints make centralized processing infeasible. Logic neural networks (LNNs), which directly learn Boolean logic instead of conventional arithmetic operations, have recently emerged as a state-of-the-art approach for efficient inference and are particularly well suited for deployment in custom silicon. However, hard-wired solutions are typically optimized for narrowly defined tasks and lack the ability to adapt to changing data distributions. Next-generation pixel detectors in particle physics present a particularly challenging use case: their high granularity and readout frequency generate data rates that cannot be centrally processed, while stringent space and power constraints necessitate highly efficient on-chip inference. Moreover, radiation damage progressively alters detector response, requiring models that can be re-trained and reconfigured after deployment. In this work, we evaluate LNNs for on-chip inference in pixel detectors. We show that their superior resource efficiency may enable a step change in model capability, making more complex architectures feasible within the available hardware budget. LNNs also provide increased robustness against radiation-induced random bit flips. Finally, we present novel work on reconfigurable LNNs, enabling models to adapt to changing operating conditions after deployment.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2026

A study of CMS analysis pipelines through the Integration Challenge

The upcoming High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) at CERN will deliver an unprecedented volume of data for High Energy Physics (HEP). This wealth of information offers significant opportunities for scientific discovery, but its scale challenges traditional analysis workflows. In this paper, we present CMS analysis pipelines being developed to meet HL-LHC demands. These pipelines build on the broader scientific Python ecosystem, complemented by solutions specifically designed for HEP. A central focus of this work is the Integration Challenge, an IRIS-HEP led effort aimed at assessing the readiness of developed software stack to be used in real world physics analysis and improving the readiness of analysis facilities for the HL-LHC era. The Integration Challenge acts as an end-to-end integration test: by implementing a complete physics analysis pipeline, it evaluates tool interoperability and the overall user experience for analysts. The current pipeline includes columnar data processing, machine learning, statistical inference, and visualization tasks covering a variety of CMS analysis scenarios. In addition, the Integration Challenge explores efficient strategies for delivering skimmed data using diverse tools and data formats, as well as evaluating the ServiceX data-delivery system for HEP analyses. Throughout the testing phase, we also investigated several prototype services, such as histogram-as-a-service capabilities, along with other emerging services that may support future HL-LHC analysis workflows.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2026

Hypothesis-awkward: Property-Based Testing Strategies for Awkward Array

Hypothesis-awkward is a collection of Hypothesis strategies for Awkward Array. Awkward Array can represent a wide variety of nested, variable-length, mixed-type data. Many tools that process Awkward Arrays are widely used and actively developed. The unit test cases of many of these tools list predefined input samples. In practice, such samples can cover only a small portion of the vast combinatorial space of Awkward Array instances. Hypothesis, a Python property-based testing library, generates test data that can make test cases fail and automatically explores edge cases. The main strategy of Hypothesis-awkward generates nearly all possible Awkward Arrays, with options to control the layout, data types, missing values, masks, and other array attributes. Property-based tests written with these strategies have begun to run in the continuous integration of Awkward Array; to date, they cover a small part of Awkward Array and have found 37 bugs in it, as well as one in Hypothesis itself. These strategies make the tests of Awkward Array and of the tools that use it more reliable.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

Bridging the Vendor Gap: Enabling AMD GPU Support for Awkward Array via ROCm/HIP for the HL-LHC Era

The High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) will demand order-of-magnitude gains in analysis throughput, and increasingly those gains must come from GPUs that are not made by a single vendor. Leadership-class systems such as El Capitan, Frontier and LUMI are built on AMD accelerators, yet the Scikit-HEP analysis stack---and Awkward Array in particular---has grown up CUDA-first. We report on $rawkward$, a Rust-backed kernel engine that adds a ROCm/HIP backend for Awkward Array's nested, jagged, variable-length data structures. Our central finding is that a naive source-level port of CUDA kernels to HIP loses $5$--$10\times$ in performance on irregular kernels, because AMD's $64$-lane wavefronts, higher register pressure and more expensive divergence behave fundamentally differently from NVIDIA's $32$-thread warps. We show that a small, reusable set of optimization patterns---loop flattening, $128$-bit vectorized loads, splitting fused kernels, and profile-guided launch configuration---recovers CUDA-class performance without changing the public API. A Rust macro-and-match dispatch layer keeps a single, backend-agnostic call site while emitting vendor-specific kernel strategies, and the type system enforces buffer-size and lifetime correctness at compile time. On a two-socket AMD Instinct MI210 node we measure GPU speedups from $1.03\times$ (bandwidth-bound $sum$) up to $12.5\times$ ($count$) over $128$ EPYC~7763 CPU cores, and the Rust CPU kernels match or beat on aggregate the incumbent C++ kernels (geometric-mean runtime ratio $0.37\times$ across twelve kernels). We argue that these patterns constitute a practical recipe for performance-portable, vendor-agnostic HEP analysis kernels.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2025

The 200 Gbps Challenge: Imagining HL-LHC analysis facilities

The IRIS-HEP software institute, as a contributor to the broader HEP Python ecosystem, is developing scalable analysis infrastructure and software tools to address the upcoming HL-LHC computing challenges with new approaches and paradigms, driven by our vision of what HL-LHC analysis will require. The institute uses a "Grand Challenge" format, constructing a series of increasingly large, complex, and realistic exercises to show the vision of HL-LHC analysis. Recently, the focus has been demonstrating the IRIS-HEP analysis infrastructure at scale and evaluating technology readiness for production. As a part of the Analysis Grand Challenge activities, the institute executed a "200 Gbps Challenge", aiming to show sustained data rates into the event processing of multiple analysis pipelines. The challenge integrated teams internal and external to the institute, including operations and facilities, analysis software tools, innovative data delivery and management services, and scalable analysis infrastructure. The challenge showcases the prototypes - including software, services, and facilities - built to process around 200 TB of data in both the CMS NanoAOD and ATLAS PHYSLITE data formats with test pipelines. The teams were able to sustain the 200 Gbps target across multiple pipelines. The pipelines focusing on event rate were able to process at over 30 MHz. These target rates are demanding; the activity revealed considerations for future testing at this scale and changes necessary for physicists to work at this scale in the future. The 200 Gbps Challenge has established a baseline on today's facilities, setting the stage for the next exercise at twice the scale.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2024

Line Segment Tracking: Improving the Phase 2 CMS High Level Trigger Tracking with a Novel, Hardware-Agnostic Pattern Recognition Algorithm

Charged particle reconstruction is one the most computationally heavy components of the full event reconstruction of Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments. Looking to the future, projections for the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) indicate a superlinear growth for required computing resources for single-threaded CPU algorithms that surpass the computing resources that are expected to be available. The combination of these facts creates the need for efficient and computationally performant pattern recognition algorithms that will be able to run in parallel and possibly on other hardware, such as GPUs, given that these become more and more available in LHC experiments and high-performance computing centres. Line Segment Tracking (LST) is a novel such algorithm which has been developed to be fully parallelizable and hardware agnostic. The latter is achieved through the usage of the Alpaka library. The LST algorithm has been tested with the CMS central software as an external package and has been used in the context of the CMS HL-LHC High Level Trigger (HLT). When employing LST for pattern recognition in the HLT tracking, the physics and timing performances are shown to improve with respect to the ones utilizing the current pattern recognition algorithms. The latest results on the usage of the LST algorithm within the CMS HL-LHC HLT are presented, along with prospects for further improvements of the algorithm and its CMS central software integration.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2024

Improving tracking algorithms with machine learning: a case for line-segment tracking at the High Luminosity LHC

In this work, we present a study on ways that tracking algorithms can be improved with machine learning (ML). We base this study on the line segment tracking (LST) algorithm that we have designed to be naturally parallelized and vectorized in order to efficiently run on modern processors. LST has been developed specifically for the CMS Experiment at the LHC, towards the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) upgrade. Moreover, we have already shown excellent efficiency and performance results as we iteratively improve LST, leveraging a full simulation of the CMS detector. At the same time, promising deep-learning-based tracking algorithms, such as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), are being pioneered on the simplified TrackML dataset. These results suggest that parts of LST could be improved or replaced by ML. Thus, a thorough, step-by-step investigation of exactly how and where ML can be utilized, while still meeting realistic HL-LHC performance and efficiency constraints, is implemented as follows. First, a lightweight neural network is used to replace and improve upon explicitly defined track quality selections. This neural network is shown to be highly efficient and robust to displaced tracks while having little-to-no impact on the runtime of LST. These results clearly establish that ML can be used to improve LST without penalty. Next, exploratory studies of GNN track-building algorithms are described. In particular, low-level track objects from LST are considered as nodes in a graph, where edges represent higher-level objects or even entire track candidates. Then, an edge-classifier GNN is trained, and the efficiency of the resultant edge scores is compared with that of the existing LST track quality selections. These GNN studies provide insights into the practicality and performance of using more ambitious and complex ML algorithms for HL-LHC tracking at the CMS Experiment.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2024

Symbolic Regression on FPGAs for Fast Machine Learning Inference

The high-energy physics community is investigating the potential of deploying machine-learning-based solutions on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to enhance physics sensitivity while still meeting data processing time constraints. In this contribution, we introduce a novel end-to-end procedure that utilizes a machine learning technique called symbolic regression (SR). It searches the equation space to discover algebraic relations approximating a dataset. We use PySR (a software to uncover these expressions based on an evolutionary algorithm) and extend the functionality of hls4ml (a package for machine learning inference in FPGAs) to support PySR-generated expressions for resource-constrained production environments. Deep learning models often optimize the top metric by pinning the network size because the vast hyperparameter space prevents an extensive search for neural architecture. Conversely, SR selects a set of models on the Pareto front, which allows for optimizing the performance-resource trade-off directly. By embedding symbolic forms, our implementation can dramatically reduce the computational resources needed to perform critical tasks. We validate our method on a physics benchmark: the multiclass classification of jets produced in simulated proton-proton collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. We show that our approach can approximate a 3-layer neural network using an inference model that achieves up to a 13-fold decrease in execution time, down to 5 ns, while still preserving more than 90% approximation accuracy.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Generalizing mkFit and its Application to HL-LHC

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.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2023

Knowledge Distillation for Anomaly Detection

Unsupervised deep learning techniques are widely used to identify anomalous behaviour. The performance of such methods is a product of the amount of training data and the model size. However, the size is often a limiting factor for the deployment on resource-constrained devices. We present a novel procedure based on knowledge distillation for compressing an unsupervised anomaly detection model into a supervised deployable one and we suggest a set of techniques to improve the detection sensitivity. Compressed models perform comparably to their larger counterparts while significantly reducing the size and memory footprint.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Speeding up the CMS track reconstruction with a parallelized and vectorized Kalman-filter-based algorithm during the LHC Run 3

One of the most challenging computational problems in the Run 3 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and more so in the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) is expected to be finding and fitting charged-particle tracks during event reconstruction. The methods used so far at the LHC and in particular at the CMS experiment are based on the Kalman filter technique. Such methods have shown to be robust and to provide good physics performance, both in the trigger and offline. In order to improve computational performance, we explored Kalman-filter-based methods for track finding and fitting, adapted for many-core SIMD architectures. This adapted Kalman-filter-based software, called "mkFit", was shown to provide a significant speedup compared to the traditional algorithm, thanks to its parallelized and vectorized implementation. The mkFit software was recently integrated into the offline CMS software framework, in view of its exploitation during the Run 3 of the LHC. At the start of the LHC Run 3, mkFit will be used for track finding in a subset of the CMS offline track reconstruction iterations, allowing for significant improvements over the existing framework in terms of computational performance, while retaining comparable physics performance. The performance of the CMS track reconstruction using mkFit at the start of the LHC Run 3 is presented, together with prospects of further improvement in the upcoming years of data taking.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2023

IRIS-HEP Strategic Plan for the Next Phase of Software Upgrades for HL-LHC Physics

The quest to understand the fundamental building blocks of nature and their interactions is one of the oldest and most ambitious of human scientific endeavors. CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) represents a huge step forward in this quest. The discovery of the Higgs boson, the observation of exceedingly rare decays of $B$ mesons, and stringent constraints on many viable theories of physics beyond the Standard Model (SM) demonstrate the great scientific value of the LHC physics program. The next phase of this global scientific project will be the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) which will collect data starting circa 2029 and continue through the 2030s. The primary science goal is to search for physics beyond the SM and, should it be discovered, to study its implications. In the HL-LHC era, the ATLAS and CMS experiments will record around 100 times as many collisions as were used to discover the Higgs boson (and at twice the energy). Both NSF and DOE are making large detector upgrade investments so the HL-LHC can operate in this high-rate environment. Similar investment in software R&D for acquiring, managing, processing and analyzing HL-LHC data is critical to maximize the return-on-investment in the upgraded accelerator and detectors. This report presents a strategic plan for a possible second 5-year funded phase (2023 through 2028) for the Institute for Research and Innovation in Software for High Energy Physics (IRIS-HEP) which will close remaining software and computing gaps to deliver HL-LHC science.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2022

Second Analysis Ecosystem Workshop Report

The second workshop on the HEP Analysis Ecosystem took place 23-25 May 2022 at IJCLab in Orsay, to look at progress and continuing challenges in scaling up HEP analysis to meet the needs of HL-LHC and DUNE, as well as the very pressing needs of LHC Run 3 analysis. The workshop was themed around six particular topics, which were felt to capture key questions, opportunities and challenges. Each topic arranged a plenary session introduction, often with speakers summarising the state-of-the art and the next steps for analysis. This was then followed by parallel sessions, which were much more discussion focused, and where attendees could grapple with the challenges and propose solutions that could be tried. Where there was significant overlap between topics, a joint discussion between them was arranged. In the weeks following the workshop the session conveners wrote this document, which is a summary of the main discussions, the key points raised and the conclusions and outcomes. The document was circulated amongst the participants for comments before being finalised here.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2022

Line Segment Tracking in the HL-LHC

The major challenge posed by the high instantaneous luminosity in the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) motivates efficient and fast reconstruction of charged particle tracks in a high pile-up environment. While there have been efforts to use modern techniques like vectorization to improve the existing classic Kalman Filter based reconstruction algorithms, Line Segment Tracking takes a fundamentally different approach by doing a bottom-up reconstruction of tracks. Small track stubs from adjoining detector regions are constructed, and then these track stubs that are consistent with typical track trajectories are successively linked. Since the production of these track stubs is localized, they can be made in parallel, which lends way into using architectures like GPUs and multi-CPUs to take advantage of the parallelism. The algorithm is implemented in the context of the CMS Phase-2 Tracker and runs on NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. Good physics and timing performance has been obtained, and stepping stones for the future are elaborated.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2022

Segment Linking: A Highly Parallelizable Track Reconstruction Algorithm for HL-LHC

The High Luminosity upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) will produce particle collisions with up to 200 simultaneous proton-proton interactions. These unprecedented conditions will create a combinatorial complexity for charged-particle track reconstruction that demands a computational cost that is expected to surpass the projected computing budget using conventional CPUs. Motivated by this and taking into account the prevalence of heterogeneous computing in cutting-edge High Performance Computing centers, we propose an efficient, fast and highly parallelizable bottom-up approach to track reconstruction for the HL-LHC, along with an associated implementation on GPUs, in the context of the Phase 2 CMS outer tracker. Our algorithm, called Segment Linking (or Line Segment Tracking), takes advantage of localized track stub creation, combining individual stubs to progressively form higher level objects that are subject to kinematical and geometrical requirements compatible with genuine physics tracks. The local nature of the algorithm makes it ideal for parallelization under the Single Instruction, Multiple Data paradigm, as hundreds of objects can be built simultaneously. The computing and physics performance of the algorithm has been tested on an NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU, already yielding efficiency and timing measurements that are on par with the latest, multi-CPU versions of existing CMS tracking algorithms.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2022

The HEP Software Foundation Community

The HEP Software Foundation was founded in 2014 to tackle common problems of software development and sustainability for high-energy physics. In this paper we outline the motivation for the founding of the organisation and give a brief history of its development. We describe how the organisation functions today and what challenges remain to be faced in the future.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2022

Graph Neural Networks for Charged Particle Tracking on FPGAs

The determination of charged particle trajectories in collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is an important but challenging problem, especially in the high interaction density conditions expected during the future high-luminosity phase of the LHC (HL-LHC). Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a type of geometric deep learning algorithm that has successfully been applied to this task by embedding tracker data as a graph -- nodes represent hits, while edges represent possible track segments -- and classifying the edges as true or fake track segments. However, their study in hardware- or software-based trigger applications has been limited due to their large computational cost. In this paper, we introduce an automated translation workflow, integrated into a broader tool called $\texttt{hls4ml}$, for converting GNNs into firmware for field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). We use this translation tool to implement GNNs for charged particle tracking, trained using the TrackML challenge dataset, on FPGAs with designs targeting different graph sizes, task complexites, and latency/throughput requirements. This work could enable the inclusion of charged particle tracking GNNs at the trigger level for HL-LHC experiments.

physics.ins-det↗