Also available as
J. Apostolakis1, L. M. Bertolotto2, C. E. Bruschini1, P. Calafiura1
,
F. Gagliardi1,
M. Metcalf1, A. Norton1,
B. Panzer-Steindel1K. J. Peach2
The CERN experiment NA48 is actively using a 64-processor Meiko CS-2 machine provided by the ESPRIT project GP-MIMD2, running, as part of their day-to-day work, simulation and analysis programs parallelized in the framework of the project. The CS-2 is also used as a data warehouse for NA48: data coming at high rate from the experiment are processed in real-time and written to DEC DLTs using the Meiko Parallel File System (PFS) as a high-speed I/O buffer.
The ESPRIT project GP-MIMD2 started in March 1993 and will terminate at the end of February 1996. Its goal is to demonstrate the use of a European general-purpose MIMD computer, the Meiko CS-2, for CPU and I/O intensive applications from both the academic and the industrial research communities.
CERN, as a leading partner in the project, exploits a 32-node CS-2 system produced by the British company Meiko Ltd, Bristol. Each node consists of a twin-processor board equipped with two 100-MHz Sparc processors, 128 MBytes RAM and 1-4 GBytes of disk. A substantial upgrade of CERN CS-2 to a 64-node configuration is scheduled for April 1996. The nodes are interconnected with a high-performance (50 Megabytes/s) low-latency (less than 10 microsecond) network developed by Meiko as part of other ESPRIT projects. The machine is connected via Ethernet, FDDI and HIPPI interfaces to the CERN network. The working environment for the end-user is a normal Unix environment(SUN Solaris). MPI, PARMACS and PVM message passing libraries are available for parallel programming.