Physicists widely use a software toolkit called GEANT4 to simulate what will happen when a particular kind of particle hits a particular kind of material in a particle detector. In fact, this toolkit is so popular that it is also used by researchers in other fields who want to predict how particles will interact with other matter: it’s used to assess radiation hazards in space, for commercial air travel, in medical imaging, and even to optimise scanning systems for cargo security. An international team, led by researchers at CERN, is now working to develop a new version of this simulation toolkit, called GeantV. This work is supported by a CERN openlab project with Intel on code modernisation. GeantV will improve physics accuracy and boost performance on modern computing architectures. The team behind GeantV is currently implementing a ‘deep-learning' tool that will be used to make simulation faster. The goal of this project is to write a flexible mini-application that can be used to support the efforts to train the deep neural network on distributed computing systems.