CERN openlab Explores New CPU/FPGA Processing Solutions

HPC Wire, Apr. 14, 2017 – 

At CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, physicists and engineers are probing the fundamental structure of the universe. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which began working in 2008, is the world?s largest and most powerful particle accelerator; it is housed in an underground tunnel at CERN. Niko Neufeld is a deputy project leader at CERN who works on the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment, which explores what happened after the Big Bang that allowed matter to survive and build the Universe we inhabit today.

"CERN experiments produce an enormous amount of data with forty million proton collisions every second, which leads to primary data rates of terabits per second," says Neufeld when speaking on a recent FPGA vs. CPU panel. "This is an enormous amount of data and there are a number of technical challenges in our work. We use a number of processing solutions including central processing units (CPUs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and graphic processing units (GPUs), but each of these solutions have some limitations. We are collaborating with Intel in experimenting with a co-packaged Intel Xeon processor plus FPGA Quick Path Interconnect (QPI) processor in our LHCb research to try to determine which technology provides the best results."

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