Bringing heterogeneity to the CMS software framework

Understand

The advent of computing resources with co-processors, for example Graphics Processing Units (GPU) or Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), for use cases like the CMS High-Level Trigger (HLT) or data processing at leadership-class supercomputers imposes challenges for the current data processing frameworks.

• These challenges include developing a model for algorithms to offload their computations on the co-processors as well as keeping the traditional CPU busy doing other work.
• The CMS data processing framework, CMSSW, implements multithreading using the Intel Threading Building Blocks (TBB) library, that utilizes tasks as concurrent units of work.
• In this paper we will discuss a generic mechanism to interact effectively with non-CPU resources that has been implemented in CMSSW.