Speaker
Description
The NICA (Nuclotron-based Ion Collider fAcility) project at JINR (Dubna, Russia) aims to investigate hot and dense strongly interacting matter in heavy-ion collisions at center-of-mass energies up to 11 GeV per nucleon pair. One of the flagship experiments of the project is the Multi-Purpose Detector (MPD), which employs a large Time Projection Chamber (TPC) as its main tracking device. The efficient and reliable operation of the TPC requires a dedicated Data Acquisition System (DAQ) capable of sustaining high data rates, ensuring precise synchronization, and providing robust online monitoring.
The TPC DAQ system features a modular architecture comprising 95,232 readout channels, implemented with 1,488 Front-End Cards (FECs) grouped into 24 sectors of 62 FECs each. Each FEC communicates via a dedicated full-duplex multi-gigabit channel with a Readout and Control Unit (RCU), which manages 1/24 of the TPC volume. Data from RCUs are transferred through high-speed optical links to Local Data Concentrator (LDC) computers, where every four optical links are aggregated by a Data Concentrator Unit (DCU) card. Each DCU serves four RCUs and delivers data to the LDC memory via a PCIe interface. The LDCs form the interface between the TPC DAQ and the global MPD DAQ framework.
The system is optimized to process raw TPC events of up to 37 MB per central heavy-ion collision, corresponding up to 2000 reconstructed tracks, at trigger rates of up to 7 kHz in zero-suppression mode. Results from prototype testing confirm stable operation, low dead time, and compatibility with the overall MPD DAQ architecture.
| Position | Lead engineer |
|---|---|
| Affiliation | JINR |
| Country | Russia |