JANA2 LDRD (Final Project Report)
Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, Newport News, VA (United States), David Lawrence, USDOE, Nathan Brei · 2020
The project sought to develop a second generation of the JANA reconstruction framework that leverages modern programming features (C++11 and C++14) while maintaining its basic user centric design. The goals included making the project easy to deploy to large HPC facilities such as NERSC and to include detailed documentation to allow scientists outside of Jefferson Lab to use it at such a facility. This would position JLab to play a key role in the larger Laboratory based computing ecosystem under the ASCR initiative. The experience gained will help inform the design of Exascale class applications for experimental nuclear physics. Developing a next generation JANA provides an advantage over older serial frameworks or ones retro-fitted to provide some multi-threading support. That technique requires significantly more memory than multi-threading which leads to compute jobs being limited by available RAM, and not fully utilizing the available CPU. The smaller memory footprint of multi-threaded programs also leads to increased efficiency due to fewer cache misses. It is for these and other reasons that multi-threading is the more accepted industry standard in the modern era.