| Published Articles | |
| Title | The ALICE high-level trigger read-out upgrade for LHC Run 2 |
| Author(s) | Engel, H (Frankfurt U.) ; Alt, T (Frankfurt U.) ; Breitner, T (Frankfurt U.) ; Ramirez, A Gomez (Frankfurt U.) ; Kollegger, T (Darmstadt, GSI) ; Krzewicki, M (Frankfurt U.) ; Lehrbach, J (Frankfurt U.) ; Rohr, D (Frankfurt U.) ; Kebschull, U (Frankfurt U.) |
| Collaboration | ALICE |
| Publication | 2016 |
| In: | JINST 11 (2016) C01041 |
| In: | Topical Workshop on Electronics for Particle Physics, Lisbon, Portugal, 28 Sep - 2 Oct 2015, pp.C01041 |
| DOI | 10.1088/1748-0221/11/01/C01041 |
| Subject category | Detectors and Experimental Techniques |
| Accelerator/Facility, Experiment | CERN LHC ; ALICE |
| Abstract | The ALICE experiment uses an optical read-out protocol called Detector Data Link (DDL) to connect the detectors with the computing clusters of Data Acquisition (DAQ) and High-Level Trigger (HLT). The interfaces of the clusters to these optical links are realized with FPGA-based PCI-Express boards. The High-Level Trigger is a computing cluster dedicated to the online reconstruction and compression of experimental data. It uses a combination of CPU, GPU and FPGA processing. For Run 2, the HLT has replaced all of its previous interface boards with the Common Read-Out Receiver Card (C-RORC) to enable read-out of detectors at high link rates and to extend the pre-processing capabilities of the cluster. The new hardware also comes with an increased link density that reduces the number of boards required. A modular firmware approach allows different processing and transport tasks to be built from the same source tree. A hardware pre-processing core includes cluster finding already in the C-RORC firmware. State of the art interfaces and memory allocation schemes enable a transparent integration of the C-RORC into the existing HLT software infrastructure. Common cluster management and monitoring frameworks are used to also handle C-RORC metrics. The C-RORC is in use in the clusters of ALICE DAQ and HLT since the start of LHC Run 2. |
| Copyright/License | cc-by |
Corresponding record in: Inspire
Record created 2017-05-30, last modified 2017-07-31
