Particle physicists at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory are pushing the boundaries of cosmic inquiry with their latest innovation: Celeritas, a software that simulates particle interactions at unprecedented speeds. Celeritas, a tool named after the Latin word for speed, is enhancing the capabilities of researchers by performing simulations on graphics processing units (GPUs) which are known for their robust parallel processing abilities, a stark contrast to the traditional central processing units' (CPUs) propensity for sequential task management.
As Oak Ridge National Laboratory reported, Seth Johnson of their Computational Sciences and Engineering Division, mentioned, "Celeritas establishes ORNL as a focal point for high-performance computing in high energy physics.” Celeritas is not just about handling the sheer volume of data generated from particle collisions, but it's also about accelerating the pace at which these colossal amounts of information are processed, a critical factor in the realm of high-energy physics, where even a single second can yield a billion collision events.
The software is proving its mettle by supporting significant particle physics experiments like the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) in the United States, where neutrinos are propelled from Fermilab in Illinois all the way to South Dakota. In Europe, it's backing operations at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) involving the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) and A Toroidal LHC Apparatus (ATLAS), facilities that dwarf some of the world's most recognized landmarks in size and mass.
According to the same ORNL release, increase in data is a certainty, especially with the High-Luminosity LHC on the horizon, scheduled to complete by 2030. Johnson explains the imminent spike in data production, "They're making the LHC brighter, the brighter it is, the more data it makes. Because more particle events are happening at once, we have to do many more simultaneous calculations to see what might be going on." The sheer scale, and complexity of this task cannot be overstated, with even a petabyte of data being processed on an average day at the CERN Data Center after the preliminary data filtration process.
Stepping into the world of future science and potentially universe-altering discoveries, Celeritas is a beacon of progress. It is not only optimizing simulations on ORNL's Frontier supercomputer, which ranks as the fastest in open science, but it is also laying the groundwork to use artificial intelligence for data analysis. Johnson echoed the significance of the project for the broader field when he said, "We’re doing things that are very new and have applications across multiple fields. It’s a really exciting thing to be doing for that reason alone," as mentioned on the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
