Application of T9000 to CPLEAR

9 Projections And Summary

Despite the prototype nature of the T9000 and the known hardware bugs, some of them severe, we have been able to install and operate a network of 54 T9000s and 20 C104s. The system has been operated reliably at the CPLEAR experiment at CERN, running a very large event reconstruction program in real-time.

Currently the computational performance of the T9000 is below its design goals. In particular:

The clock speed is 20 MHz and not 50 MHz
Many floating point operations take three cycles instead of two
Some trigonometric functions run three times slower than expected
The lack of a native Fortran compiler necessitates the use of f2c, which on a T805 and a SUN Sparc station gives a performance penalty equal to a factor of 1.5.

However, if these issues are promptly addressed the T9000 might still prove to be a cost-effective solution for embedded system applications due to its high level of integration and functionality, ease of scalability, and low cost.

The new communication system using DS links and C104 switches shows considerable promise. The C104 in particular offers high density cost-effective commodity communications, which can be used to build very large switching networks. DS link technology is going through a standardization process (IEEE P1355), and the link speed is likely to increase by a factor of two within the next year.

A 64 T9000 GPMIMD machine using 56 C104s will be completed early in 1995 and will be upgraded with 40 MHz T9000s as soon as they are available. The performance of the machine within the CPLEAR application could also be improved by using a native Fortran compiler and optimization of the CPREAD code.

The GPMIMD machine will be used as a test bed for the type of communication architectures required for triggering and event building in future generation experiments. In addition, hybrid nodes consisting of a T9000 as a communications processor and a high-performance RISC chip to provide computational power will be tested.

Application of T9000 to CPLEAR - 09 NOV 95

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