ITS Cluster Finding Algorithm on GPU

ITS cluster finding algorithm is one of the data reduction algorithms at ALICE. It needs to be processed fast due to a high amount of data readout from the detector. A variety of platforms were studied for the system design. My work is to design, implement and benchmark this algorithm on a GPU platform. GPU is one of many platform that promote parallel computing. A high-end GPU can contain over 2000 processing cores comparing to the commodity CPUs which have only four cores. The program is written in C and CUDA library. The throughput (Number of events per second) is used as a metric to measure the performance. With the latest implementation, the throughput was increased by a factor of 5.