  Physics event generators are essential components of the data analysis
software chain of high energy physics experiments, and important consumers of
their CPU resources. Improving the software performance of these packages on
modern hardware architectures, such as those deployed at HPC centers, is
essential in view of the upcoming HL-LHC physics programme. In this paper, we
describe an ongoing activity to reengineer the Madgraph5_aMC@NLO physics event
generator, primarily to port it and allow its efficient execution on GPUs, but
also to modernize it and optimize its performance on vector CPUs. We describe
the motivation, engineering process and software architecture design of our
developments, as well as the current challenges and future directions for this
project. This paper is based on our submission to vCHEP2021 in March
2021,complemented with a few preliminary results that we presented during the
conference. Further details and updated results will be given in later
publications.
