10–14 Nov 2014
INFN - LNS
Europe/Rome timezone

Triggerless Readout: Umberto Marconi

Triggerless readout

Umberto Marconi

Trigger is an essential component of every particle detector, to operate with high counting rate and small signal-to-background ratio. Hardware triggers are widely used to select event's typologies/topologies such to reduce the input rate. However, owing to the limited amount of information and processing time budget available, hardware trigger may cause the largest inefficiencies in the entire trigger chain and troubles with systematics. Trigger-less detector readout allows removing hardware trigger bottlenecks and to effectively control systematics. With this approach, only a versatile software trigger, running on a dedicated filter-farm, will process events at the full speed. The cost of the event-builder, in case a large-scale trigger-less system is concerned, can be minimized by using cost-effective data-centre technology in the network, and ensuring short distances between the components. Data-centre technologies in the event-builder network require the use of PCs as end-points. The readout boards, on this purpose, can be embedded in the PC servers as peripherals, by using PCI Express. The event-building requires to bring data from all the readout boards into a single CPU, so that a local area network has to be used for this. Several LAN technologies are, or will be, likely available. However, at the moment there are only two, which have a certain market-share and are known outside very specialized context: Ethernet (IEEE 802.3) and InfiniBand and both will allow 100 Gb/s speed.

Umberto Marconi is INFN senior researcher at INFN Sezione di Bologna. His main research interest is in beauty and charm physics at the LHC collider, with the LHCb experiment. His current research activity focuses on the the design and the implementation of the new trigger-less readout system for the LHCb detector upgrade.
Umberto Marconi is experienced with calorimetry, trigger, online and offline computing. Within the LHCb experiment he has been in charge as LHCb Computing Resource Coordinator, LHCb National Coordinator, LHCb Bologna Team Leader.