In this latest episode of SYCL Sessions, I was joined by co-host Dr Tom Deakin and Dr Attila Krasznahorkay who is helping to lead the efforts at CERN on the ATLAS experiment.

The ATLAS experiment is the largest, general purpose particle detector experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and is helping to advance physics to make new discoveries, for example the Higgs boson. The experiment includes a huge code base involving both the processing of data from the detector but also many simulations that are used to examine this data too.

A large challenge for this experiment's team is that the sheer volume of information is increasing and new techniques are required to process it in an acceptable timeframe. Attila presents the challenges they are facing and how they are exploring ways to solve that using SYCL to target GPUs from a range of vendors.

Tom and I also had a short chat with Attila about the presentation and some of the large challenges faced when migrating large code bases to run on accelerator processors such as GPUs.

Alongside that I talked with Tom about the upcoming schedule at IWOCL and SYCLcon where there are a record 22 SYCL talks scheduled on the program, and discussed some other activities happening in the SYCL community.