Adding Cross-Platform Support to a High-Throughput Software Stack and Exploration of Vectorization Libraries

This master thesis is written at the LHCb experiment at CERN. It is part of the initiative for improving software in view of the upcoming upgrade in 2021 which will significantly increase the amount of acquired data. This thesis consists of two parts. The first part is about the exploration of different vectorization libraries and their usefulness for the LHCb collaboration. The second part is about adding cross-platform support to the LHCb software stack. Here, the LHCb stack is successfully ported to ARM (aarch64) and its performance is analyzed. At the end of the thesis, the port to PowerPC(ppc64le) awaits the performance analysis. The main goal of porting the stack is the cost-performance evaluation for the different platforms to get the most cost efficient hardware for the new server farm for the upgrade. For this, selected vectorization libraries are extended to support the PowerPC and ARM platform. And though the same compiler is used, platform-specific changes to the compilation flags are required. In the evaluation of the port to ARM, the cost-performance analysis favors the tested Intel machine. Future steps will be to analyze the performance of the port to PowerPC and to improve the cross-platform support for selected vectorization libraries. The long-term goal is adding cross-platform support to the LHCb stack.