Speaker
Jaroslav Zalesak
(Acad. of Sciences of the Czech Rep. (CZ))
Description
The NOvA experiment has developed a data acquisition system that is able to continuously digitize and produce a zero bias streaming readout for the more than 368,000 detectors cells that constitute the 14 kTon far detector. The NOvA DAQ system combines custom built frontend readout and data aggregation hardware, with advances in enterprise class networking to continuously deliver data to large commodity computing farm where the data can be buffered, examined and extracted to durable storage.
In addition to the unique design of the acquisition hardware, the NOvA DAQ system is novel in its use of a sophisticated hierarchy of software components that handle resource discovery, configuration and management as well as the formal event building and processing. This broad suite of software allows for the dynamic allocation of multiple instances of the DAQ chain. This allows the experiment to be used simultaneously for detector commissioning tasks, dedicated studies of detector performance and for production data taking and has allowed the experiment to begin production data taking while the detector is still being built.
The NOvA DAQ system was deployed to the far detector in January 2013 and has been used to successfully commission the far detector and being production data taking. This paper will present the overall design of the core data acquisition and timing systems and will examine the performance of the DAQ over the first six months of detector operations. It examines the performance issues and scaling behaviors that have been encountered in increasing the size of the readout, networking and data processing by over an order of magnitude to handle the physical size of the detector. It will present some of the first looks at the NOvA far detector neutrino data.
Author
Jaroslav Zalesak
(Acad. of Sciences of the Czech Rep. (CZ))
Co-authors
Alec Habig
(Univ. of Minnesota Duluth)
Denis Perevalov
(Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory)
Jonathan Paley
(Argonne National Laboratory)
Kurt Biery
(CMS/Fermilab)
Dr
Mathew Muether
(Fermilab)
Dr
Peter Shanahan
(Fermilab)
Ronald Rechenmacher
(Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (Fermilab))
Susan Kasahara
(University of Minnesota)
