Future Computing Platforms for Science in a Power Constrained Era

TL;DR

This paper surveys current and emerging computing architectures, evaluating their performance and energy efficiency for high energy physics distributed computing under power constraints, to inform future platform choices.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive comparison of diverse architectures using standardized benchmarks and power measurements, focusing on their suitability for power-constrained high throughput computing.

Findings

ARM and GPU solutions show promising energy efficiency.

Emerging SoC architectures could enhance power-constrained DHTC.

Performance-per-watt varies significantly across architectures.

Abstract

Power consumption will be a key constraint on the future growth of Distributed High Throughput Computing (DHTC) as used by High Energy Physics (HEP). This makes performance-per-watt a crucial metric for selecting cost-efficient computing solutions. For this paper, we have done a wide survey of current and emerging architectures becoming available on the market including x86-64 variants, ARMv7 32-bit, ARMv8 64-bit, Many-Core and GPU solutions, as well as newer System-on-Chip (SoC) solutions. We compare performance and energy efficiency using an evolving set of standardized HEP-related benchmarks and power measurement techniques we have been developing. We evaluate the potential for use of such computing solutions in the context of DHTC systems, such as the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG).