Gießen 2007 – scientific programme

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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 34: Instrumentation und Anwendungen

HK 34.1: Talk

Wednesday, March 14, 2007, 14:15–14:30, B

An FPGA based Preprocessor for the ALICE High Level Trigger — •Torsten Alt, Volker Lindenstruth, Florian Painke, Jörg Peschek, and Timm Morten Steinbeck — Kirchhoff Institute of Physics, Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg, Germany

The H-RORC (High Level Trigger ReadOut Receiver Card) is an FPGA based PCI card designed to receive raw detector data from ALICE, transfer it into the online processing framework of the HLT cluster farm and transmit the processed data out of the HLT to the DAQ. Each RORC can be equipped with two optical receiver/transmitter units and transfer up to 400 Mbyte/s via PCI. For online processing in hardware the Virtex4 LX40 FPGA is supported by four independent modules of fast DDR-SDRAM providing up to 512 Mbyte total storage at a bandwidth of 2.3 Gbyte/s and two fast serial, full-duplex links which can be used as an direct interconnect in order to exchange data between several RORCs. In replay mode the onboard memory can be loaded with real or simulated events thus giving a real-time testbench for the HLT framework. A special configuration scheme suits the requirements of a cluster environment and allows a safe and remote upgrade of the firmware. The H-RORC was used successfully in the first time run of the HLT during the TPC commissioning 2006.