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CERN openlab II - Platform Competence Centre
Platform Competence Centre (PCC) is a project being developed at
first in
the context of openlab-II.
During CERN openlab II, the PCC project focused on the PC-based computing
hardware and the related software. It addressed important
fields, including platform virtualization and
application optimization.
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Virtualization |
Platform virtualization can be used to allow
grid applications to enjoy a highly secure and
standardized environment presented by a “virtual
machine hypervisor”, independent of all the hardware
and software intricacies. The virtualization
concept, initially offered as a pure software
solution, will be gradually moved into hardware,
allowing greatly improved performance of both the
hypervisors and its “guests”. |
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Optimization |
Software and hardware optimization is seen as a
vital part of the WLCG deployment, since the demand
for resources by the scientists is very likely to
outstrip the available resources, even inside the
Grid. Such optimization relies on profound knowledge
of the architecture of the entire computing
platform. On one hand this covers hardware items,
such as processors, memory, buses, input/output
channels, on the other hand it covers the ability to
use proficiently advanced tools, such as profilers,
compilers and linkers, specially optimized library
functions, etc. |
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