Title :
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
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;
Conference_Titel :
Nuclear Science Symposium Conference Record, 2000 IEEE
Conference_Location :
Lyon
Print_ISBN :
0-7803-6503-8
DOI :
10.1109/NSSMIC.2000.949971
