Speaker
Mr
Sylvain Chapeland
(CERN)
Description
ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is the heavy-ion detector designed to study
the physics of strongly interacting matter and the quark-gluon plasma at the CERN
Large Hadron Collider (LHC). A large bandwidth and flexible Data Acquisition System
(DAQ) is required to collect sufficient statistics in the short running time
available per year for heavy ion and to accommodate very different requirements
originated from the large set of detectors and the different beams used. The DAQ
system has been designed, implemented, and intensively tested. It has reached
maturity and is being installed at the experimental area for tests and commissioning
of detectors. It is heavily based on commodity hardware and open-source software but
it also includes specific devices for custom needs. The interaction of thousands of
DAQ entities turns out to be the core of this challenging project. We will present
the overall ALICE data-acquisition architecture, showing how the data flow is handled
from the front-end electronics to the permanent data storage. Then some
implementation choices (PCs, networks, databases) will be discussed, in particular
the usage of tools for controlling and synchronizing the elements of this diversified
environment. Practical aspects of deployment and infrastructure running will be
covered as well, including performance tests achieved so far.
Primary author
Mr
Sylvain Chapeland
(CERN)
Co-authors
Alessandro Vascotto
(CERN)
Csaba SOOS
(CERN)
Ervin Denes
(KFKI Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics)
Ferhat Ozok
(Department of Physics)
Franco CARENA
(CERN)
Irina MAKHLYUEVA
(CERN)
Jean-Claude MARIN
(CERN)
Klaus SCHOSSMAIER
(CERN)
Ozgur Cobanoglu
(Univ. + INFN)
Pierre VANDE VYVRE
(CERN)
Roberto DIVIA
(CERN)
Sergio Vergara Limon
(Benemerita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla, Mexico)
Tivadar Kiss
(KFKI Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics)
Tome Anticic
(Rudjer Boskovic Institute)
Ulrich Fuchs
(Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen)
Wisla CARENA
(CERN)
