Q&A: CTO of CERN's openlab

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The LHC experiment has been delayed for over a year. What technology upgrades have happened in that time?

We’ve been very pleased with results we’ve found on mulitcore systems. We started with the Woodcrests, but already when Clovertown came, we actually had an event here in the Globe [a building at the CERN campus] when Intel was ready, exactly three years ago with the Clovertown.

And so right now we’re so happy with the multicore strategy that we jump on every incremental improvement because it's so important to us, so we expect to be equally enthused with the Westmere.

What other new technologies is openlab looking at?

We’re sort of in starting blocks for these kind of technologies, we’re in the fortunate situation that a lot of our programmes are written in house, so they’re in source format.

So we’re actually spending a lot of time just making sure we understand them and are able to parallelise them across mulitcore systems, for instance. So we’re preparing the grounds for some future stuff.

What tech do you see being big in the future, and maybe filtering down into enterprise or other areas?

Well I don't think we can pretend we are the forerunner for all industry. We’re not always in agreement with people that rely on very high reliability systems. But if you’re a bank, that’s your obligation.

So we expect that we will go down the road of many-core parallelism, so maybe 16 core, 32 core, who knows. Maybe in certain cases, that means a certain risk of less reliability, now this still shouldn't be red pixels in a blue sky, but it might mean the mean-time between failures not being thousands of hours but maybe being a bit shorter.

Those are some of the issues we have to evaluate before we live with certain breakaway technologies because they are interesting but they also carry some element of risk with them.

What other technology challenges do you face?

In our case, it’s performance per watt and dollar, and also things like reliability. A big issue in discussion at CERN is ease of programming, since all the applications are built in house.

As you know vector hardware is coming back with a vengeance, after the days of Cray and NEC and the others. And the big debate inside our community is whether vector computing can be utilised and should be utilised.

Should particles be strung out in a vector? Today they’re not. Today we’re more in object oriented programme. A particle is an object, the next particle is an object. It’s not just an array element.

What do you see happening? Will physics go back to vector systems, or stick with object oriented?

The big difference, if you think about it for two minutes, is that cray and the super computers used to be very exotic machines.

You personally will have vectors on your laptop whether you like it or not. This time, whether we like it or not, they’re going to be everywhere. They’re going to be hard to avoid in the longrun.

People are saying "they’re here already, why don’t we use them". In the past, you asked, "should we really invest $10 million in a supercomputer" and many people would vote against it.

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