Speaker
Description
ATLAS is a high energy physics experiment in the Large Hadron Collider
located at CERN.
During the so called Long Shutdown 2 period scheduled for late 2018,
ATLAS will undergo
several modifications and upgrades on its data acquisition system in
order to cope with the
higher luminosity requirements. As part of these activities, a new
read-out chain will be built
for the New Small Wheel muon detector and the one of the Liquid Argon
calorimeter will be
upgraded. The subdetector specific electronic boards will be replaced
with new
commodity-server-based systems and instead of the custom SLINK-based
communication,
the new system will make use of a yet to be chosen commercial network
technology.
The new network will be used as a data acquisition network and at the
same time it is intended
to allow communication for the control, calibration and monitoring of
the subdetectors.
Therefore several types of traffic with different bandwidth requirements
and different criticality
will be competing for the same underlying hardware. One possible way to
address this problem
is using a SDN based solution.
SDN stands for Software Defined Networking and it is an innovative
approach to network
management. Instead of the classic network protocols used to build a
network topology and to
create traffic forwarding rules, SDN allows a centralized controller
application to programmatically
build the topology and create the rules that are loaded into the network
devices. The controller can
react very fast to new conditions and new rules can be installed on the
fly. A typical use case is a
network topology change due to a device failure which is handled
promptly by the SDN controller.
Dynamically assigning bandwidth to different traffic types based on
different criteria is also possible.
On the other hand, several difficulties can be anticipated such as the
connectivity to the controller
when the network is booted and the scalability of the number of rules as
the network grows.
This work summarizes the evaluation of the SDN technology in the context
of the research carried
out for the ATLAS data acquisition system upgrade. The benefits and
drawbacks of the new approach
will be discussed and a deployment proposal will be made.
| Primary Keyword (Mandatory) | Network systems and solutions |
|---|---|
| Secondary Keyword (Optional) | DAQ |
