DPM PERFORMANCE TESTING USING RASPBERRY PIS

This is the final report from attending CERN’s Summer Student Programme. The project goal was to do performance testing on the Disk Pool Manager (DPM), a lightweight, reliable, grid-aware storage software used to store and retrieve data produced by CERN’s LHC experiments using the small, low-end ARM powered devices named Raspberry Pis. The idea behind it was to reason if it’s possible to use a cluster of lower-end, under-capable devices to run DPM, and to conclude if it would be more energy efficient than running it on oversized machines, with the same or comparable performance. If this hypothesis was true, the power-hungry machines could be ditched in favour of these small devices, leading to an enormous saving in overall power consumption and hence, overall cost. In this report, I describe what was the initial project goal and intended outcomes, proceeding to explain the underlying technologies used. Afterwards, I’ll explain the setup used, the tests performed, and the conclusions reached. ii