A high-speed DAQ framework for future high-level trigger and event building clusters

Abstract

Modern data acquisition and trigger systems require a throughput of several GB/s and latencies of the order of microseconds. To satisfy such requirements, a heterogeneous readout system based on FPGA readout cards and GPU-based computing nodes coupled by InfiniBand has been developed. The incoming data from the back-end electronics is delivered directly into the internal memory of GPUs through a dedicated peer-to-peer PCIe communication. High performance DMA engines have been developed for direct communication between FPGAs and GPUs using "DirectGMA (AMD)" and "GPUDirect (NVIDIA)" technologies. The proposed infrastructure is a candidate for future generations of event building clusters, high-level trigger filter farms and low-level trigger system. In this paper the heterogeneous FPGA-GPU architecture will be presented and its performance be discussed.