Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP) 2012

Comparison of the CPU efficiency of High Energy and Astrophysics applications on different multi-core processor types.

22 May 2012, 13:30

4h 45m

Rosenthal Pavilion (10th floor) (Kimmel Center)

Poster Computer Facilities, Production Grids and Networking (track 4) Poster Session

Speaker

Andreas Heiss (KIT - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (DE))

Description

GridKa, operated by the Steinbuch Centre for Computing at KIT, is the German regional centre for high energy and astroparticle physics computing, supporting currently 10 experiments and serving as a Tier-1 centre for the four LHC experiments. Since the beginning of the project in 2002, the total compute power is upgraded at least once per year to follow the increasing demands of the experiments. The hardware is typically operated for about four years until it is replaced by more modern machines. The GridKa compute farm thus consists of a mixture of several generations of compute nodes differing in several parameters, e.g. CPU types, main memory, network connection bandwidth etc. We compare the CPU efficiency (CPU time to wall time ratio) of high energy physics and astrophysics compute jobs on these different types of compute nodes and estimate the impact of the ongoing trend towards many-core CPUs.