Studying the Potential of Graphcore® IPUs for Applications in Particle Physics

Abstract

This paper presents the first study of Graphcore’s Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) in the context of particle physics applications. The IPU is a new type of processor optimised for machine learning. Comparisons are made for neural-network-based event simulation, multiple-scattering correction, and flavour tagging, implemented on IPUs, GPUs and CPUs, using a variety of neural network architectures and hyperparameters. Additionally, a Kálmán filter for track reconstruction is implemented on IPUs and GPUs. The results indicate that IPUs hold considerable promise in addressing the rapidly increasing compute needs in particle physics.