Leveraging HPC resources for High Energy Physics
B. J. O’Brien, Rod Walker, A. Washbrook · Journal of Physics Conference Series · 2014
High Performance Computing (HPC) supercomputers provide unprecedented computing power for a diverse range of scientific applications. The most powerful supercomputers now deliver petaflop peak performance with the expectation of exascale technologies available in the next five years. More recent HPC facilities use x86-based architectures managed by Linux-based operating systems which could potentially allow unmodified HEP software to be run on supercomputers. There is now a renewed interest from both the LHC experiments and the HPC community to accommodate data analysis and event simulation production on HPC facilities. This study provides an outline of the challenges faced when incorporating HPC resources for HEP software by using the HECToR supercomputer as a demonstrator.