The continued progression of Moore’s law has led to many-core platforms becoming easily accessible commodity equipment. New opportunities that arose from this change have also brought new challenges: harnessing the raw potential of computation of such a platform is not always a straightforward task. This paper describes practical experience coming out of the work with many-core systems at CERN openlab and the observed differences with respect to their predecessors. We provide the latest results for a set of parallelized HEP benchmarks running on several classes of many-core platforms.

As the mainstream computing world has shifted from multi-core to many-core platforms, the situation for software developers has changed as well. With the numerous hardware and software options available, choices balancing programmability and performance are becoming a significant challenge. The expanding multiplicative dimensions of performance offer a growing number of possibilities that need to be assessed and addressed on several levels of abstraction.