High Energy Physics Processing using Commodity components (HEP PC)

Commodity computing components, such as modern personal computers and their operating systems, may be ideal building blocks for the large processor farms required by future High Energy Physics experiments, including those of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Driven by the multimedia and client-server business market, commodity systems today deliver 32-bit computing power, high speed interconnectivity and multi- tasking virtual memory operating systems similar to scientific workstations, at lower cost. A research and development effort is proposed, centered about the evaluation of processor farms based on the Windows NT operating system running on a variety of hardware platforms.