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.

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”.
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.