Chapter 15

Parallel Track Fitting in the CERN Collider

What's in This Chapter?

Introducing particle track fitting

Introducing Intel Array Building Blocks

Parallelizing programs using Intel Array Building Blocks

This chapter looks at parallelizing code that determines particle tracks within high-energy physics experiments. This represents some of the work done at the CERN GSI establishment in Darmstadt, Germany. The group is well known for its discovery of the elements bohrium, hassium, meitnerium, darmstadtium, roentgenium, and copernicium.

Intel Array Building Blocks (ArBB) is a research project, and consists of a C++ template library that provides a high-level data parallel programming solution. By using ArBB to parallelize software, you can produce thread-safe, future-proofed applications. The six hands-on activities let you try out parallelizing a serial track-fitting program using ArBB.

The Case Study

The Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) project is designed to explore the properties of super-dense nuclear matter by using a particle accelerator to collide charged particles against a fixed target.

The word baryonic in the project title refers to baryons, large particles made up of three quarks — a quark being an elementary particle from which all matter is made. Quarks are found neither on their own nor in isolation.

One of the aims of the CBM experiment is to search for the transition of baryons to quarks and gluons (the particles that hold together the quarks). The CBM project ...

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