[SLAC] [SLAC Pubs and Reports]
SLAC-PUB-7990
Choosing CPUs in an Open Market: System Performance Testing for the
BABAR Online Farm
Abstract
BABAR is a high-rate experiment to study CP violation in asymmetric
e+e- collisions. The BABAR Online Farm is
a pool of workstations responsible for the last layer of event
selection, as well as for full reconstruction of selected events and
for monitoring functions. A large number of machine architectures were
evaluated for use in this Online Farm. We present an overview of the
results of this evaluation, which include tests of low-level OS
primitives, tests of memory architecture, and tests of
application-specific CPU performance. Factors of general interest to
others making hardware decisions are highlighted. Performance of
current BABAR reconstruction (written in C++) is found to scale fairly
well with SPECint95, but with some noticeable deviations. Even for
machines with similar SPEC CPU ratings, large variations in memory
system performance exist. No single operating system has an overall
edge in the performance of its primitives. In particular, freeware
operating systems perform no worse overall than the commercial
offerings.
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