Use of hardware accelerators for ATLAS computing

Modern HEP experiments produce tremendous amounts of data. This data is processed by in-house built software frameworks which have lifetimes longer than the detector it- self. Such frameworks were traditionally based on serial code and relied on advances in CPU technologies, mainly clock frequency, to cope with increasing data volumes. With the advent of many-core architectures and GPGPUs this paradigm has to shift to paral- lel processing and has to include the use of co-processors. However, since the design of most existing frameworks is based on the assumption of frequency scaling and predate co-processors, parallelisation and integration of co-processors are not an easy task. The ATLAS experiment is an example of such a big experiment with a big software frame- work called Athena. In this proceedings we will present the studies on parallelisation and co-processor (GPGPU) use in data preparation and tracking for trigger and offline recon- struction as well as their integration into a multiple process based Athena framework.