Fast, high-quality pseudo random number generators for heterogeneous computing
File(s)epjconf_chep2024_11010.pdf (1.83 MB)
Published version
Author(s)
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
Random number generation is key to many applications in a wide variety of disciplines. Depending on the application, the quality of the random numbers from a particular generator can directly impact both computational performance and critically the outcome of the calculation. High-energy physics applications use Monte Carlo simulations and machine learning widely, which both require high-quality random numbers. In recent years, to meet increasing performance requirements, many high-energy physics workloads leverage GPU acceleration. While on a CPU, there exist a wide variety of generators with different performance and quality characteristics, the same cannot be stated for GPU and FPGA accelerators. On GPUs, the most common implementation is provided by cuRAND - an NVIDIA library that is not open source or peer reviewed by the scientific community. The highest-quality generator implemented in cuRAND is a version of the Mersenne Twister. Given the availability of better and faster random number generators, high-energy physics moved away from Mersenne Twister several years ago and nowadays MIXMAX is the standard generator in Geant4 via CLHEP. The MIXMAX original design supports parallel streams with a seeding algorithm that makes it especially suited for GPU and FPGA where extreme parallelism is a key factor. In this study we implement the MIXMAX generator on both architectures and analyze its suitability and applicability for accelerator implementations. We evaluated the results against “Mersenne Twister for a Graphic Processor” (MTGP32) on GPUs which resulted in 5, 13 and 14 times higher throughput when a 240, 17 and 8 sized vector space was used respectively. The MIXMAX generator coded in VHDL and implemented on Xilinx Ultrascale+ FPGAs, requires 50% fewer total Look Up Tables (LUTs) compared to a 32-bit Mersenne Twister (MT-19337), or 75% fewer LUTs per output bit. In summary, the state-of-the art MIXMAX pseudo random number generator has been implemented on GPU and FPGA platforms and the performance benchmarked.
Editor(s)
De Vita, R
Espinal, X
Laycock, P
Shadura, O
Date Issued
2024-05-06
Date Acceptance
2023-05-08
Citation
EPJ Web of Conferences, 2024, 295
ISSN
2100-014X
Publisher
EDP Sciences
Journal / Book Title
EPJ Web of Conferences
Volume
295
Copyright Statement
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2024
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
License URL
Identifier
http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/202429511010
Source
26th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP 2023)
Publication Status
Published
Start Date
2023-05-08
Finish Date
2023-05-12
Coverage Spatial
Norfolk, VA
Date Publish Online
2024-05-06