Speaker
Mr
Robert Reed
(University of the Witwatersrand)
Description
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is currently undergoing a major
upgrade to handle higher energies. This will be the first of two upgrades and the expected amount of data produced by this upgraded system will far exceed current data throughput capabilities. It is expected that the same will be so for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Radio Telescope. A potential alternative to current high performance computing systems involves using low-cost, low-power ARM processors in large arrays to provide massive parallelisation and hence large data throughput. The central advantage in using ARM processors is found in the central processing unit (CPU). As such, a thorough evaluation and benchmarking of the CPUs of three different models of ARM processor, namely the Cortex-A7, Cortex-A9,and Cortex-A15, has been prepared. Results have been obtained for single and multiple (cluster-configuration)
processors and an attempt has been made to compare benchmark performance in standardised tests such as High Performance Linpack (HPL) to “real-world”
performance applications.
Summary
Keywords: ARM, benchmark, CPU, high-throughput computing, high-performance computing, LHC, ATLAS, SKA, CERN.
Primary authors
Mr
Gerhard Harmsen
(University of the Witwatersrand)
Mr
Robert Reed
(University of the Witwatersrand)
Mr
Thomas Wrigley
(University of the Witwatersrand)
Co-authors
Mr
Jonathan Padavatan
(University of the Witwatersrand)
Mr
Mitchell Cox
(University of the Witwatersrand)
