VegasFlow: accelerating Monte Carlo simulation across multiple hardware platforms

Abstract

We present VegasFlow, a new software for fast evaluation of high dimensional integrals based on Monte Carlo integration techniques designed for platforms with hardware accelerators. The growing complexity of calculations and simulations in many areas of science have been accompanied by advances in the computational tools which have helped their developments. VegasFlow enables developers to delegate all complicated aspects of hardware or platform implementation to the library so they can focus on the problem at hand. This software is inspired on the Vegas algorithm, ubiquitous in the particle physics community as the driver of cross section integration, and based on Google’s powerful TensorFlow library. We benchmark the performance of this library on many different consumer and professional grade GPUs and CPUs.