The steady rise of the speed, or clock-frequency, of computer processors has resulted in design challenges for chip-makers in recent years. For example, the increasing heat generated by multi-gigahertz processors – said by some to approach the heat produced in a nuclear reactor – leads to difficulty in cooling chips efficiently.
Placing two, then four, processor cores on the same chip allows several applications to run in parallel with big boosts in overall performance, and lowers cooling bills for computer centres. PCs with multicore chips, such as the Intel quadcore PC launched last November at CERN, are especially attractive to the Grid computing centres affiliated with the high-energy physics community, whose applications require large amounts of parallel computing.
CERN's openlab programme received an early version of the chips for testing. The programme, of which Intel is a partner, used its well-defined methods to evaluate the chip's performance and validate it with high-energy physics benchmarks (see "Processors size up for physics at the LHC"). The testing included a demonstration of how quad-core processors can speed up the rate of a typical scientific calculation involving a parallelized version of the program ROOT, widely used in the high-energy physics community, by nearly a factor of four over conventional single-core processors. A parallel version of the ROOT program was used to split a data set into four pieces and calculate them in parallel on the quadcore chip.
• This is an abridged version, reproduced with permission, of an article first published online on iSGTW (www.isgtw.org).