Investigation of heterogeneous computing platforms for real-time data analysis in the CBM experiment

Future experiments in high-energy physics will pose stringent requirements to computing, in particular to real-time data processing. As an example, the CBM experiments intends to perform online data selection exclusively in software, without using any hardware trigger, at extreme interaction rates of up to 10 MHz. In this article, we describe how heterogeneous computing platforms, in particular Graphical Processing Units (GPUs), can be used to solve the associated computing problems, giving the example of an event selection process sensitive to J/$\psi$ decays using muon detectors. We investigate and compare different parallel computing paradigms (OpenCL, OpenMP, MPI, CUDA) on both CPU and GPU architectures and demonstrate that the problem under consideration can be accommodated with a moderate deployment of hardware resources, provided their compute power is made optimal use of.