Affordable and power efficient computing for high energy physics: CPU and FFT benchmarks of ARM processors
Mitchell Arij Cox, Robert Graham Reed, B. Mellado · 2016
Projects such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN generate enormous amounts of raw data which presents a serious computing challenge. After planned upgrades in 2022, the data output from the ATLAS Tile Calorimeter will increase by 200 times to over 40 Tb/s. ARM System on Chips are common in mobile devices due to their low cost, low energy consumption and high performance and may be an aordable alternative to standard x86 based servers where massive parallelism is required. High Performance Linpack and CoreMark benchmark applications are used to test ARM Cortex-A7, A9 and A15 System on Chips CPU performance while their power consumption is measured. In addition to synthetic benchmarking, the FFTW library is used to test the single precision Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) performance of the ARM processors and the results obtained are converted to theoretical data throughputs for a range of FFT lengths. These results can be used to assist with specifying ARM rather than x86-based compute farms for upgrades and upcoming scientific projects.