Commodity multi-processor systems in the ATLAS level-2 trigger

Author

Abolins, M. ; Blair, R. ; Bock, R. ; Bogaerts, A. ; Dawson, J. ; Ermoline, Y. ; Hauser, R. ; Kugel, A. ; Lay, R. ; Muller, M. ; Noffz, K.-H. ; Pope, B. ; Schlereth, J. ; Werner, P.

Author_Institution

Michigan State Univ., East Lansing, MI, USA

Volume

2

fYear

2000

fDate

2000

Abstract

Low cost SMP (symmetric multi-processor) systems provide substantial CPU and I/O capacity. These features together with the ease of system integration make them an attractive and cost effective solution for a number of real-time applications in event selection. In ATLAS we consider them as intelligent input buffers (an “active” ROB complex), as event flow supervisors or as powerful processing nodes. Measurements of the performance of one off-the-shelf commercial 4-processor PC with two PCI buses, equipped with commercial FPGA based data source cards (microEnable) and running commercial software are presented and mapped on such applications together with a long-term programme of work. The SMP systems may be considered as an important building block in future data acquisition systems

Keywords

data acquisition; field programmable gate arrays; high energy physics instrumentation computing; multiprocessing systems; ATLAS; FPGA; ROB complex; data acquisition; event flow; level-2 trigger; microEnable; symmetric multi-processor; Application software; Costs; Data acquisition; High performance computing; Laboratories; Memory architecture; Silicon; Software measurement; Switches; System buses;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Nuclear Science Symposium Conference Record, 2000 IEEE

Conference_Location

Lyon

ISSN

1082-3654

Print_ISBN

0-7803-6503-8

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/NSSMIC.2000.949971

Filename

949971