Seminar: Graduate Seminar
Accelerating symbolic computation system for physical simulation
Date:
September,23,2026
Start Time:
10:00 - 11:00
Location:
506, New Zisapel Building
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Lecturer:
Assaf Klein
Research Areas:
| FORM is the workhorse symbolic-computation system of high-energy physics, but its parallelism stops at the sort. Every computation step ends by sorting the expression’s terms, and at that point FORM funnels them through a single master rank, which merges the duplicated union of all workers’ output, volume that grows with the worker count. Past a modest scale the sort, not the computational operation, bounds the run. We restructure FORM’s per-step sort as a Map-Reduce computation, splitting the workers into mappers and reducers so that terms are deduplicated and sorted in parallel. This eliminates the master’s serial merge, cuts the communicated volume, and shrinks the data before it reaches disk. On this new structure we add two further optimizations that take the master off the critical path: the merger assembles its output by bulk-copying whole sorted blocks rather than merging term by term, and each node keeps its own share of the expression between steps so the sort and the storage divide across the cluster. Adopted by changing only a form call, with no change to physics scripts, the new pipeline scales near-linearly with the node count. On a production graviton workload the new pipeline delivers results in 3Ksec on a 8-node configuration, opposed to 35Ksec on the previous 1-node script, getting an 11× end-to-end speedup, turning previously infeasible multi-loop calculations into routine computation. M.Sc. student under the supervision of Prof. Mark Silberstein.
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