Master Thesis Open Access

A Fast AI-Based Track Reconstruction on FPGA for the PANDA Experiment

Greta Heine


JSON-LD (schema.org) Export

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org/", 
  "@type": "ScholarlyArticle", 
  "contributor": [], 
  "creator": [
    {
      "@type": "Person", 
      "affiliation": "KIT/ETP, KIT/IPE", 
      "name": "Greta Heine"
    }
  ], 
  "datePublished": "2022-09-15", 
  "description": "<p>Efficient reconstruction of charged particle trajectories is a crucial yet very difficult step&nbsp;in the analysis pipeline of high energy physics (HEP) experiments. Recent work has&nbsp;shown that graph neural networks (GNNs) are well suited for the pattern recognition&nbsp;task of track finding, where tracking detector hits can be naturally represented as nodes&nbsp;and particle track segments as edges. The interaction network (IN) GNN architecture&nbsp;provides computationally efficient edge classification of the high-dimensional and sparse&nbsp;tracker data, which is especially crucial for implementation in constrained computing&nbsp;environments such as field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). This work describes the&nbsp;overall workflow for implementing and systematically analyzing an IN-based classification&nbsp;of track segments on FPGAs for the anti-Proton&nbsp;Annihilation at&nbsp;DArmstadt (PANDA)&nbsp;forward tracking system (FTS). This workflow includes data preprocessing, graph building, GNN-based edge classification and a series of FPGA implementation design studies&nbsp;concerning latency, resource utilization, and classification quality using the high level&nbsp;synthesis for machine learning (hls4ml) compiler. The presented final implementation of&nbsp;the GNN-based track segment classifier on a Xilinx Zynq&nbsp;provides an overall inference latency of about&nbsp;0.99&nbsp;&mu;s&nbsp;using about&nbsp;34 %&nbsp;of available digital signal processors (DSPs) and&nbsp;85 %&nbsp;of available lookup tables (LUTs). This work enables the acceleration of charged particle tracking on heterogeneous computational resources toward real-time track reconstruction for the PANDA experiment. The discussed methods and studies could be easily adapted and used in other HEP experiments for accelerated charged particle tracking.</p>", 
  "headline": "A Fast AI-Based Track Reconstruction on FPGA for the PANDA Experiment", 
  "image": "https://publish.etp.kit.edu/static/img/logos/zenodo-gradient-round.svg", 
  "keywords": [
    "HEP, Machine Learning, GNN, FPGA, PANDA, Tracking"
  ], 
  "name": "A Fast AI-Based Track Reconstruction on FPGA for the PANDA Experiment", 
  "url": "https://publish.etp.kit.edu/record/22136"
}

Cite as