CERN Accelerating science

ATLAS Note
Report number	ATL-SOFT-PROC-2017-017
Title	Multi-threaded ATLAS simulation on Intel Knights Landing processors
Author(s)	Farrell, Steven (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California, Berkeley) ; Calafiura, Paolo (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California, Berkeley) ; Leggett, Charles (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California, Berkeley) ; Tsulaia, Vakhtang (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California, Berkeley) ; Dotti, Andrea (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)
Corporate Author(s)	The ATLAS collaboration
Collaboration	ATLAS Collaboration
Publication	2017
Imprint	24 Jan 2017
Number of pages	7
In:	J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 898 (2017) 042012
In:	22nd International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics, CHEP 2016, San Francisco, Usa, 10 - 14 Oct 2016, pp.042012
DOI	10.1088/1742-6596/898/4/042012
Subject category	Particle Physics - Experiment
Accelerator/Facility, Experiment	CERN LHC ; ATLAS
Free keywords	Xeon Phi ; Knights Landing ; simulation ; multithreading
Abstract	The Knights Landing (KNL) release of the Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC) Xeon Phi line of processors is a potential game changer for HEP computing. With 72 cores and deep vector registers, the KNL cards promise significant performance benefits for highly-parallel, compute-heavy applications. Cori, the newest supercomputer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), was delivered to its users in two phases with the first phase online at the end of 2015 and the second phase now online at the end of 2016. Cori Phase 2 is based on the KNL architecture and contains over 9000 compute nodes with 96GB DDR4 memory. ATLAS simulation with the multithreaded Athena Framework (AthenaMT) is a good potential use-case for the KNL architecture and supercomputers like Cori. ATLAS simulation jobs have a high ratio of CPU computation to disk I/O and have been shown to scale well in multi-threading and across many nodes. In this paper we will give an overview of the ATLAS simulation application with details on its multi-threaded design. Then, we will present a performance analysis of the application on KNL devices and compare it to a traditional x86 platform to demonstrate the capabilities of the architecture and evaluate the benefits of utilizing KNL platforms like Cori for ATLAS production.
Copyright/License	publication: (License: CC-BY-3.0)

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