skip to main content

Title: 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 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.
Authors:
; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Award ID(s):
1934360 1934757 1836650
Publication Date:
NSF-PAR ID:
10350214
Journal Name:
Frontiers in Big Data
Volume:
5
ISSN:
2624-909X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Doglioni, C. ; Kim, D. ; Stewart, G.A. ; Silvestris, L. ; Jackson, P. ; Kamleh, W. (Ed.)
    One of the most computationally challenging problems expected for the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) is finding and fitting particle tracks during event reconstruction. Algorithms used at the LHC today rely on Kalman filtering, which builds physical trajectories incrementally while incorporating material effects and error estimation. Recognizing the need for faster computational throughput, we have adapted Kalman-filterbased methods for highly parallel, many-core SIMD and SIMT architectures that are now prevalent in high-performance hardware. Previously we observed significant parallel speedups, with physics performance comparable to CMS standard tracking, on Intel Xeon, Intel Xeon Phi, and (to a limited extent) NVIDIA GPUs. While early tests were based on artificial events occurring inside an idealized barrel detector, we showed subsequently that our mkFit software builds tracks successfully from complex simulated events (including detector pileup) occurring inside a geometrically accurate representation of the CMS-2017 tracker. Here, we report on advances in both the computational and physics performance of mkFit, as well as progress toward integration with CMS production software. Recently we have improved the overall efficiency of the algorithm by preserving short track candidates at a relatively early stage rather than attempting to extend them over many layers. Moreover, mkFit formerly produced an excessmore »of duplicate tracks; these are now explicitly removed in an additional processing step. We demonstrate that with these enhancements, mkFit becomes a suitable choice for the first iteration of CMS tracking, and eventually for later iterations as well. We plan to test this capability in the CMS High Level Trigger during Run 3 of the LHC, with an ultimate goal of using it in both the CMS HLT and offline reconstruction for the HL-LHC CMS tracker.« less
  2. Abstract

    Recent work has demonstrated that geometric deep learning methods such as graph neural networks (GNNs) are well suited to address a variety of reconstruction problems in high-energy particle physics. In particular, particle tracking data are naturally represented as a graph by identifying silicon tracker hits as nodes and particle trajectories as edges, given a set of hypothesized edges, edge-classifying GNNs identify those corresponding to real particle trajectories. In this work, we adapt the physics-motivated interaction network (IN) GNN toward the problem of particle tracking in pileup conditions similar to those expected at the high-luminosity Large Hadron Collider. Assuming idealized hit filtering at various particle momenta thresholds, we demonstrate the IN’s excellent edge-classification accuracy and tracking efficiency through a suite of measurements at each stage of GNN-based tracking: graph construction, edge classification, and track building. The proposed IN architecture is substantially smaller than previously studied GNN tracking architectures; this is particularly promising as a reduction in size is critical for enabling GNN-based tracking in constrained computing environments. Furthermore, the IN may be represented as either a set of explicit matrix operations or a message passing GNN. Efforts are underway to accelerate each representation via heterogeneous computing resources towards both high-levelmore »and low-latency triggering applications.

    « less
  3. Graph neural networks have been shown to achieve excellent performance for several crucial tasks in particle physics, such as charged particle tracking, jet tagging, and clustering. An important domain for the application of these networks is the FGPA-based first layer of real-time data filtering at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, which has strict latency and resource constraints. We discuss how to design distance-weighted graph networks that can be executed with a latency of less than one μs on an FPGA. To do so, we consider a representative task associated to particle reconstruction and identification in a next-generation calorimeter operating at a particle collider. We use a graph network architecture developed for such purposes, and apply additional simplifications to match the computing constraints of Level-1 trigger systems, including weight quantization. Using the hls4ml library, we convert the compressed models into firmware to be implemented on an FPGA. Performance of the synthesized models is presented both in terms of inference accuracy and resource usage.
  4. Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved tremendous success on multiple graph-based learning tasks by fusing network structure and node features. Modern GNN models are built upon iterative aggregation of neighbor's/proximity features by message passing. Its prediction performance has been shown to be strongly bounded by assortative mixing in the graph, a key property wherein nodes with similar attributes mix/connect with each other. We observe that real world networks exhibit heterogeneous or diverse mixing patterns and the conventional global measurement of assortativity, such as global assortativity coefficient, may not be a representative statistic in quantifying this mixing. We adopt a generalized concept, node-level assortativity, one that is based at the node level to better represent the diverse patterns and accurately quantify the learnability of GNNs. We find that the prediction performance of a wide range of GNN models is highly correlated with the node level assortativity. To break this limit, in this work, we focus on transforming the input graph into a computation graph which contains both proximity and structural information as distinct type of edges. The resulted multi-relational graph has an enhanced level of assortativity and, more importantly, preserves rich information from the original graph. We then propose to runmore »GNNs on this computation graph and show that adaptively choosing between structure and proximity leads to improved performance under diverse mixing. Empirically, we show the benefits of adopting our transformation framework for semi-supervised node classification task on a variety of real world graph learning benchmarks.« less
  5. Abstract The Exa.TrkX project has applied geometric learning concepts such as metric learning and graph neural networks to HEP particle tracking. Exa.TrkX’s tracking pipeline groups detector measurements to form track candidates and filters them. The pipeline, originally developed using the TrackML dataset (a simulation of an LHC-inspired tracking detector), has been demonstrated on other detectors, including DUNE Liquid Argon TPC and CMS High-Granularity Calorimeter. This paper documents new developments needed to study the physics and computing performance of the Exa.TrkX pipeline on the full TrackML dataset, a first step towards validating the pipeline using ATLAS and CMS data. The pipeline achieves tracking efficiency and purity similar to production tracking algorithms. Crucially for future HEP applications, the pipeline benefits significantly from GPU acceleration, and its computational requirements scale close to linearly with the number of particles in the event.