Abstract
For Run 2 of the LHC, LHCb is replacing a significant part of its event filter farm with new compute nodes. For the evaluation of the best performing solution, we have developed a method to convert our high level trigger application into a stand-alone, bootable benchmark image. With additional instrumentation we turned it into a self-optimising benchmark which explores techniques such as late forking, NUMA balancing and optimal number of threads, i.e. it automatically optimises box-level performance. We have run this procedure on a wide range of Haswell-E CPUs and numerous other architectures from both Intel and AMD, including also the latest Intel micro-blade servers. We present results in terms of performance, power consumption, overheads and relative cost.
Highlights
The LHCb High Level Trigger (HLT) farm [1] is a data centre which is located at P8 of the LHC accelerator
It should be noted here that we have decided against using HEP-SPEC since we have found discrepancies on the order of 10% between what HEP-SPEC reported and our application achieved on various platforms
The plot shows the throughput of trigger decisions vs. the number of running HLT instances on five different machines
Summary
The LHCb High Level Trigger (HLT) farm [1] is a data centre which is located at P8 of the LHC accelerator. This benchmark can be installed on a Live DVD and distributed to platform integrators to test various computing platforms for their efficiency and optimise trigger decision throughput vs price and power demands. We will show how we turned our application into a benchmark, the results we obtained for running the software on different platforms and improvements we made to the machines in order to maximise trigger throughput.
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