Speaker
Description
The ATLAS experiment explores new hardware and software platforms that, in the future,
may be more suited to its data intensive workloads. One such alternative hardware platform
is the ARM architecture, which is designed to be extremely power efficient and is found
in most smartphones and tablets.
CERN openlab recently installed a small cluster of ARM 64-bit evaluation prototype servers.
Each server is based on a single-socket ARM 64-bit system on a chip, with 32 Cortex-A57 cores.
In total, each server has 128 GB RAM connected with four fast memory channels. This paper reports
on the port of the ATLAS software stack onto these new prototype ARM64 servers. This included building
the "external" packages that the ATLAS software relies on. Patches were needed to introduce this
new architecture into the build as well as patches that correct for platform specific code that
caused failures on non-x86 architectures. These patches were applied such that porting to further
platforms will need no or only very little adjustments. A few additional modifications were
needed to account for the different operating system, Ubuntu instead of Scientific Linux 6 / CentOS7.
Selected results from the validation of the physics outputs on these ARM 64-bit servers
will be reported. CPU, memory and IO intensive benchmarks using ATLAS specific environment
and infrastructure have been performed, with a particular emphasis on the performance
vs. energy consumption.
| Primary Keyword (Mandatory) | Software development process and tools |
|---|---|
| Secondary Keyword (Optional) | Processor architectures |
| Tertiary Keyword (Optional) | High performance computing |
