AMD EPYC processors accelerate research at the Large Hadron Collider

AMD and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has announced a joint study. CERN will now use second-generation AMD EPYC processors to collect huge amounts of data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) detectors — the flow of information about particle collisions is a whopping 40 TB per second.

CERN is preparing to restart the collider, scheduled for 2021, and is looking for a technology platform that can handle such a colossal data stream. As part of the experiment using the smallest of the four detectors of the LHCb collider, scientists expect to gain insight into the events shortly after the Big Bang and thus why the universe developed into its current form.

To conduct the experiment, ultrafast I/O and memory is essential. A large number of processor cores make it possible to carry out fast processing, while 128 PCI Express 4.0 lines have become a unique advantage. During the experiment, four 200G Mellanox InfiniBand adapters per server are to be employed. In turn, the 64-core AMD EPYC 7742 processors have made the work of the adapters possible by eliminating delay.

Scientists note that thanks to the AMD processors, it is possible to process a stream of more than 1 TB of data per second over a period of days. It is noteworthy that this performance can now be achieved without the use of a supercomputer, as before.

“We do not have the computing power of Google or Facebook, but AMD EPYC processors have allowed us to make the necessary calculations using a relatively small and compact system. 10–15 years ago it would have been impossible. Now there is room for development. With the same EPYC technology, we can double our capabilities while occupying in the same amount of space, ”said Niko Neufeld, Project Manager at LHCb Online Computing at CERN.

HOSTKEY also offers servers based on the 2x AMD EPYC 7451, each CPU has 24 cores and a Max Boost clock speed of up to 3.2GHz.

These servers are housed in our data center in the Netherlands. You can select and order the configuration that suits you on the HOSTKEY website. All our servers are protected against DDoS attacks.

EPYC possesses a perfect balance of cores/threads, RAM, I/O bandwidth and security. Thanks to these impressive specs, application speed is accelerated and excellent performance is achieved with multiple workloads for high-performance computing.

Servers with 2 CPU sockets based on the AMD EPYC chip are flexible, powerful and secure — allowing them to efficiently deal with the most demanding workloads.