Computing Seminar

Performance test of PCs based on AMD platforms

Klaus Schossmaier, CERN/EP

Abstract

ALICE at CERN will be one of the most demanding physics experiments in the world concerning data throughput, data processing and data volumes. In order to find the best choice of computing machinery to acquire and process these data, many platforms are under evaluation at the moment. This talk reports on the testing of a rack mountable system based on AMD 32 bit dual AthlonMP processors and on AMD 64 bit Opteron machines, on loan from ICT AG, thanks to the help of AMD Europe in Geneva. The benchmark tests and the results obtained will be described.

About the speaker: After graduating as engineer in Computer Science at the Vienna University of Technology in 1991, Klaus Schossmaier got a Master of Science degree at the University of Massachusetts (USA) in 1994 and a PhD in Computer Science at the Vienna University of Technology in 1998, where he was Research Assistant in the SynUTC project. The SynUTC project is devoted to the problem of how to establish a common notion of time that also relates within a few microseconds to an external time standard, in particular, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), for a distributed fault-tolerant real-time system. For this he designed and analyzed clock synchronization algorithms and the UTCSU (Universal Time Coordinated Synchronization Unit) specifications. Since September 1999, Klaus has been working in the ALICE Data Acquisition group, where he is responsible for design and the implementation of the front-end software and for the evaluation of the VMEbus boards running Linux and for the evaluation of commercial items of the DAQ fabric to guide the purchase for the ALICE DAQ during the test and commissioning period.