It is quite common these days to hear news about the multi-core and many-core revolution. CERN openlab, always keeping pace with the latest developments, has been hard at work for quite a while in order to establish how the new multi-core architectures relate to High Energy Physics (HEP) software used today. Parallelization efforts, although not widespread at CERN, have started to bear fruit in recent months and are in a large part actively supported by openlab.

One such activity is carried out by Northeastern University researchers, Xin Dong, and his supervisor, Prof. Gene Cooperman. It relates to a complete multi-threaded conversion of a serial physics processing framework commonly used in HEP.

One of the prototypes resulting from this work has been passed to openlab for testing. Initial examinations have shown good scalability on 8-core Harpertown systems, prevalent in CERN’s computing centre. Additional tests carried out in the summer have shown that the scalability on the 8-core Nehalem-EP platform is promising as well. Other runs, executed on a 24-core Dunnington system, provided by Intel, revealed some areas needing further optimization when moving to double digit core counts.

The openlab Platform Competence Center team interfaced with the researchers from the US, as well as with local experts, in order to find ways to make the software more scalable. The work is still in progress, however significant advances and optimizations have already been made, and there are noticeable improvements introduced by the developing team based on suggestions from openlab.

In addition, in the light of the promise of 32-core Nehalem-EX systems being available soon, openlab is looking forward to expanding its operations to this new hardware, and to gaining an insight into the behaviour of High Energy Physics frameworks on a modern many-core architecture.