Introduction

On 7/12/2007 23:42, a task force was assembled to evaluate the future of the STAR software
and its evolution in the un-avoidable multi-core era of hardware realities.

The task force was composed of: Claude Pruneau (Chair), Andrew Rose, Jeff Landgraf, Victor Perevozchikov, Adam Kocolosk. The task force was later joined by Alex Wither from the RCF as the local support personnel were interested in this activity.

The charges and background information are attached at the bottom of this page.

The initial Email announcement launching the task force follows:

Startup Email (7/12/2007 23:42)

Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2007 23:42:40 -0400
From: Jerome LAURET <jlauret@bnl.gov>
To: pruneau claude <aa7526@wayne.edu>, Andrew Rose <AARose@lbl.gov>, 
 Jeff Landgraf <jml@bnl.gov>,
 Victor Perevozchikov <perev@bnl.gov>, Adam Kocoloski <kocolosk@MIT.EDU>
Subject: Multi-core CPU era task force

        Dear Claude, Adam, Victor, Jeff and Andrew,

        Thank you once again for volunteering to participate to
serve on a task force aimed to evaluate the future of our software
and work habits in the un-avoidable multi-core era which is upon
us. While I do not want to sound too dire, I believe the emergence
of this new direction in the market has potentials to fundamentally
steer code developers and facility personnel into directions they
would not have otherwise taken.

        The work and feedback you would provide on this task force
would surely be important to the S&C project as depending on
your findings, we may have to change the course of our "single-thread"
software development. Of course, I am thinking of the fundamental
question in my mind: where and how could we make use of threading
if at all possible or are we "fine" as it is and should instead
rely on the developments made in areas such as ROOT libraries.

        In all cases, out of your work, I am seeking either
guidance and recommendation as per possible improvements and/or
project development we would need to start soon to address the
identified issues or at least, a quantification of the "acceptable
loss" based on cost/performance studies. As a side note, I have
also been in discussion with the facility personnel and they may
be interested in participating to this task force (TBC) so, we
may add additional members later.


        To guide this review, I include a background historical
document and initial charges. I would have liked to work more on
the charges (including adding my expectations of this review as
stated in this Email) but I also wanted to get them out of the
door before leaving for the V-days. Would would be great would
be that, during my absence, you start discussing the topic and
upon my return, I would like to discuss with you on whether or
not you have identified key questions which are not in the charges
but need addressing. I would also like by then to identify a chair
for this task force  - the chair would be calling for meetings,
coordinate the discussions and organize the writing of a report
which ultimately, will be the result of this task force.

        Hope this will go well,

        Thank you again for being on board and my apologies for
dropping this and leaving at the same time.


-- 
              ,,,,,
             ( o o )
          --m---U---m--
              Jerome

-

Follow up EMail (8/3/2007 15:34)

Date: Fri, 03 Aug 2007 15:34:56 -0400
From: Jerome LAURET <jlauret@bnl.gov>
CC: pruneau claude <aa7526@wayne.edu>, Andrew Rose <AARose@lbl.gov>, 
 Jeff Landgraf <jml@bnl.gov>,
 Victor Perevozchikov <perev@bnl.gov>, Adam Kocoloski <kocolosk@MIT.EDU>, 
 Alexander Withers <alexw@bnl.gov>
BCC: Tim Hallman <hallman@bnl.gov>
Subject: Multi-core CPU era task force


        Dear all,

        First of all, I would like to mention that I am very pleased
that Claude came forward and offered to be the chair of this task force.
Claude's experience will certainly be an asset in this process. Thank
you.

Second news: after consulting with Micheal Ernst (Facility director
for the RACF) and Tony Chan (Linux group manager) as well as Alex
Withers from the Linux group, I am pleased to mention that Alex
has kindly accepted to serve on this task force. Alex's experience
in the facility planing and work on batch system as well as aspects
of how to make use of the multi-core trends in the parallel nascent
era of virtualization may shade some lights on issues to identify
and bring additional concepts and recommendations as per adapting
our framework and/or software to take best advantage of the multi-core
machines. I further discussed today with Micheal Ernst of the
possibility to have dedicated hardware shall testing be needed for
this task force to complete their work - the answer was positive
(and Alex may help with the communication in that regard).

        Finally, as Claude has mentioned, I would very much like for
this group to converge so a report could be provided by the end of
October at the latest (mid-October best). This time frame is not
arbitrary but is at the beginning of the fiscal year and at the
beginning of the agency solicitations for new ideas. A report by
then would allow shaping development we may possibly need for our
future.


        With all the best for your work,

Background work

The following documents were produced by the task-force members and archived here for historical purpose (and possibly providing a starting point in future).

• First meeting notes - Claude Pruneau
• CPU benchmarking (plenty of memeory context) - Andrew Rose
• Concurrent Computing for C++ Applications

CPU and memeory usage on the the farm - Alex Wither

Opteron (CPU / memory)

Xeon (CPU / memory)

CAS & CRS CPU usage, month and year

Outcome & Summary

A reminder as per the need for a reoprt was sent on 10/3/2007 to the chair (with a side track discussion on other issues which seemed to have taken attention). To accomodate for the busy times, a second reminder was sent on 11/19/2007 with a new due date for the end of november. Sub-sequent reminders were sent on the 12/10/2007 and 1/10/2008.

The task force has not deliverred the report as requested. A summary was sent in an Email as follow:

... a summary of the activities/conclusions of the committee.


... during the first meeting, all participants agreed that if
there was anything to be done, it would be on reconstruction. Members
of the committee felt that GEANT related activities are not in the
perview of STAR and should not be STAR's responsibility.  In view also
of what we did next it also appears that not much would actually be
gained.  We also discussed (1st meeting) the possibility of
multi-treading some aspects of user analysis. e.g. io, and perhaps some
aspects of processing.  Here people argued that there is too much
variability in type of analyses carried by STAR users. And it is not
clear that multi-treading would be in anyway faster - while adding much
complexity to infrastructure - if not to the user code.


Members of the committee thus decided to consider reconstruction processes only.

In subsequent meetings, we realized (based on some references test
conducted in the Industry) that perhaps not much would be gained if a
given node (say 4 cores) can be loaded with 4 or 5 jobs simultaneously
and provided sufficient RAM is available to avoid memory swapping to
disk.

Alex, and Andrew carried some tests. Alex's test were not really
conclusive because of various problems with RCF. Andrew's test however
clearly demonstrated that the wall clock time essentially does not
change if you execute 1 or 4 jobs on a 4-core node. So the effective
throughput of a multicore node scales essentially with the number of
cores. No need for complexity involving multithreading.  Instant
benefits.

Cost:   PDSF and RCF are already committed according to Alex and
Andrew to the purchase of multicore machines. This decision is driven
in part by cost effectiveness and by power requirements. 1 four core
machine consumes less power, and is less expensive than 4 1-core
machine. Additionally, that's where the whole computing industry is
going...


So it is clear the benefits of multicore technology are real and immediate without 
invocation of multitreading.

Possible exceptions to this conclusion would be for online
processing of data for trigger purposes or perhaps for fast diagnostic
of the quality of the data. Diagnostics (in STAR) are usually based on
a fairly large dataset so the advantage of multi-threading are dubious
at best in this case because the througput for one event is then
irrelevant - and it is the aggregate throuput that matters.

Online triggering is then the only justifiable case for use of
multithreading.  Multithreading would in principle enable faster
throughput for each event thereby enabling sophisticated algorithms.
This is however a very special case and it is not clear that adapting
the whole star software for this purpose is a worthy endeavor - that's
your call.

I should say in closing that the mood of the committee was overall
quite pessimistic from the onset. Perhaps a different group of people
could provide  a slightly different point of view - but I really doubt
it.