A concurrent vector-based steering framework for particle transport

High Energy Physics has traditionally been a technology-limited science that has pushed the boundaries of both the detectors collecting the information about the particles and the computing infrastructure processing this information. However, since a few years the increase in computing power comes in the form of increased parallelism at all levels, and High Energy Physics has now to optimise its code to take advantage of the new architectures, including GPUs and hybrid systems. One of the primary targets for optimisation is the particle transport code used to simulate the detector response, as it is largely experiment independent and one of the most demanding applications in terms of CPU resources. The Geant Vector Prototype project aims to explore innovative designs in particle transport aimed at obtaining maximal performance on the new architectures. This paper describes the current status of the project and its future perspectives. In particular we describe how the present design tries to expose the parallelism of the problem at all possible levels, in a design that is aimed at minimising contentions and maximising concurrency, both at the coarse granularity level (threads) and at the micro granularity one (vectorisation, instruction pipelining, multiple instructions per cycle). The future plans and perspectives will also be mentioned.