14–18 Oct 2013
Amsterdam, Beurs van Berlage
Europe/Amsterdam timezone

A PCIe GEn3 based readout for the LHCb upgrade.

15 Oct 2013, 14:10
20m
Verwey Kamer (Amsterdam, Beurs van Berlage)

Verwey Kamer

Amsterdam, Beurs van Berlage

Oral presentation to parallel session Data acquisition, trigger and controls Data Acquisition, Trigger and Controls

Speaker

Rainer Schwemmer (CERN)

Description

The architecture of the data acquisition for the LHCb upgrade is designed to allow for data transmission from the front-end electronics directly to the readout boards synchronously with the bunch crossing at the rate of 40 MHz. To connect the front-end electronics to the readout boards the upgraded detector will require order of 12000 GBT based (3.2 Gb/s radiation hard CERN serializers) optical links, for a corresponding aggregate throughput of about 38 Tb/s. The readout boards act as event buffers and the data format converters for the injection of the event fragments into the network of the High Level Trigger (HLT) computing farm. The connection between the readout boards and the HLT farm has to be designed to be capable to be seamlessly scaled up to the full readout of 40 MHz bunch-crossings. The data transfer rate will be tuned by means of a new Low Level Trigger (LLT) based on custom hardware, which will allow varying the HLT input frequency in a range between 10 to 40 MHz. A readout board consists of an ATCA compliant carrier-board, hosting up to four active AMC40-card pluggable modules (mezzanines). Each AMC40-card is equipped with a single powerful FPGA (likely a last generation Stratix V by ALTERA) used for establishing high-speed serial connections and for data processing. The AMC40-card as proposed today has 24 GBT input-links and 12 output-links. All the Stratix V FPGA serializers are 10 Gb/s. The 24 input-links deliver a maximum amount of user-data of 77 Gbit/s in the GBT standard mode. The baseline for the AMC40 foresees to implement a local area network protocol (LAN) directly in the FPGA. The candidate technologies considered so far are Ethernet and InfiniBand. An alternative solution for the read-out system is to send data from the FPGAs to the HLT farm via PCIe Gen3 bus extension/expansion (at the link-level PCIe does not look very different from the LAN protocols). Data in this approach would be pushed over a suitable physical link (optical fibre for instance) from the FPGA into a PCIe custom receiver card plugged to a HLT server motherboard. PCIe Gen3 would use 8 Gb/s on the serializers. The 12 output-links of the FPGA allows to set up two PCIe devices of varying lane-count (x4 and x8) for data transmission. The PCIe hard IP blocks available in the ALTERA FPGAs are very efficient: one 8-lane block uses less than 1% of the resources. The PCIe custom receiver card consists of an optical-to-electrical transducer plus a PCIe switch chip used to adapt to the PCIe slot of the HLT server. The main architectural advantage of using PCIe Gen3 is that the LAN protocol and link-technology can be left open until very late to profit from the most cost-effective industry technology available by the time of LS2.

Primary authors

Beat Jost (CERN) Guoming Liu (CERN) Ignazio Lax (INFN Bologna) Niko Neufeld (CERN) Paolo Durante (CERN) Rainer Schwemmer (CERN) domenico galli (Università di Bologna and INFN) umberto marconi (INFN Bologna) vincenzo vagnoni (INFN Bologna)

Presentation materials