A lot can happen in the blink of an eye. In a laboratory setting, it takes an average person about one-fifth of a second to see a light and press a button, and in that same interval a hummingbird could beat its wings about a dozen times. Meanwhile, in that same fraction of a second, specialized computer hardware analyzing particle collider data can harness artificial intelligence to make more than 10 million decisions about whether to keep or discard information created by collision events.
At the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, researchers are pushing the limits of what machines can do, leading an open-source collaboration to embed neural networks directly into physical hardware in the form of efficient, customized digital circuits. Central to this effort is hls4ml, a software framework developed with Fermilab researchers contributing their expertise. Hls4ml can be used to create ultrafast, decision-making hardware for applications ranging from particle physics to fusion science — and beyond.
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