Abstract
This paper reports on the port of the ATLAS software stack onto new prototype ARM64 servers. This included building the “external” packages that the ATLAS software relies on. Patches were needed to introduce this new architecture into the build as well as patches that correct for platform specific code that caused failures on non-x86 architectures. These patches were applied such that porting to further platforms will need no or only very little adjustments. A few additional modifications were needed to account for the different operating system, Ubuntu instead of Scientific Linux 6 / CentOS7. Selected results from the validation of the physics outputs on these ARM 64-bit servers will be shown. CPU, memory and IO intensive benchmarks using ATLAS specific environment and infrastructure have been performed, with a particular emphasis on the performance vs. energy consumption.
Highlights
The ATLAS experiment [1] is exploring new hardware and software platforms that, in the future, may be more suited to its bulk production workloads
LCG: This projects consists of the external tools that are needed in any ATLAS software
Validation tests show that while the ARM servers are comparable to the Intel Xeon, the Intel Atom has a clear trend of more hits
Summary
The ATLAS experiment [1] is exploring new hardware and software platforms that, in the future, may be more suited to its bulk production workloads. An example is simulation: a CPU intensive workload that would profit drastically if it was more “portable” and usable on a wider variety of platforms. One such alternative hardware platform is the ARM (Advanced RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) Machine) architecture, which is designed to be extremely power efficient and is found in most smartphones and tablets. Each server has 128 GB RAM connected with four fast memory channels Another type of ARM server is maintained (HP Moonshot) as well as two types of Intel servers (Intel Atom and Intel Xeon). Recently has an ARM server been able to compete with Intel in this respect
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