The Massive Affordable Computing Project: Prototyping of a High Data Throughput Processing Unit

16th International workshop on Advanced Computing and Analysis Techniques in physics research

物理学;计算机科学

Cox, Mitchell A.^1 ; Mellado, Bruce^1

School of Physics, University of the Witwatersrand, 1 Jan Smuts Avenue, Braamfontein, Johannesburg

2000, South Africa^1

关键词: Computing projects;    High energy consumption;    High volume throughput computing;    Massive parallelism;    Off-line processing;    Processing power;    Processing units;    Scientific experiments;   

Others  :  https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/608/1/012002/pdf
DOI  :  10.1088/1742-6596/608/1/012002

学科分类：计算机科学（综合）

来源: IOP

【 摘 要 】

Scientific experiments are becoming highly data intensive to the point where offline processing of stored data is infeasible. High data throughput computing or High Volume throughput Computing, for future projects is required to deal with terabytes of data per second. Conventional data-centres based on typical server-grade hardware are expensive and are biased towards processing power rather than I/O bandwidth. This system imbalance can be solved with massive parallelism to increase the I/O capabilities, at the expense of excessive processing power and high energy consumption. The Massive Affordable Computing Project aims to use low-cost, ARM System on Chips to address the issue of system balance, affordability and energy efficiency. An ARM-based Processing Unit prototype is currently being developed, with a design goal of 20 Gb/s I/O throughput and significant processing power. Novel use of PCI-Express is used to address the typically limited I/O capabilities of consumer ARM System on Chips.