Search

DUNE will be the world's largest neutrino experiment due to take data in 2025. Here is described the data acquisition (DAQ) system for one of its prototypes - ProtoDUNE-SP due to take data in Q4 of 2018. ProtoDUNE-SP also breaks records as the largest beam test experiment yet constructed, and is a fundamental element of CERN's Neutrino Platform. This renders ProtoDUNE-SP an experiment in its own right and the design and construction have been chosen to meet this scale. Due to the aggressive timescale, off-the-shelf electronics have been chosen to meet the demands of the experiment where possible. The ProtoDUNE-SP cryostat comprises two primary subdetectors - a single phase liquid Argon TPC and a companion Photon Detector. The TPC has two candidate readout solutions under test in ProtoDUNE-SP - RCE (ATCA-based) and FELIX (PCIe-based). Fermilab's artDAQ is used as the dataflow software for the experiment. Custom timing and trigger electronics and software are also described. Compression and triggering will take the ~480 Gb/s of data from the front-end and reduce it sufficiently to 20 Gb/s bandwidth to permanent data storage in CERN's EOS infrastructure., https://indico.cern.ch/event/543031/contributions/2921456/

The GSI PCI express (PCIe) optical receiver (PEXOR) family PCIe boards are used as an interface for data acquisition (DAQ) from various detector front ends, linked by up to four chains of optical fiber connections. Communication with the front-end hardware is handled by the proprietary gigabit optical serial interface protocol. A trigger module trigger for pexor extends the PEXOR by additional signal connections for triggered DAQ. For several years, the PEXOR boards have been used with the DAQ framework multibranch system (MBS). On a Linux x-86 platform, the device driver software mbspex implements concurrent access to the PEXOR front ends from MBS DAQ and from separate control applications, such as the command line tool gosipcmd or hardware specific configuration graphical user interfaces. Besides the established character driver mbspex , a network driver pexornet has been developed to evaluate a lightweight DAQ system with readout from PEXOR via a user datagram protocol (UDP) socket. Therefore, common network tools can be applied for driver configuration and data debugging. Moreover, the gosipcmd tool and its adjusted application programming interface library are fully applicable also for pexornet . A simple example DAQ application with pexornet UDP readout has been implemented with the software framework DAQ backbone core (DABC), delivering the same data file format and online monitoring capabilities as MBS. Readout performance of a test setup has been measured both with MBS/ mbspex and with DABC/ pexornet .

The magnetic confinement nuclear fusion experiments require various real-time control applications like plasma control. ITER has designed the Fast Plant System Controller (FPSC) for this job. ITER provided hardware and software standards and guidelines for building a FPSC. In order to develop various real-time FPSC applications efficiently, a flexible real-time software framework called J-TEXT real-time framework (JRTF) is developed by J-TEXT tokamak team. JRTF allowed developers to implement different functions as independent and reusable modules called Application Blocks (AB). The AB developers only need to focus on implementing the control tasks or the algorithms. The timing, scheduling, data sharing and eventing are handled by the JRTF pipelines. JRTF provides great flexibility on developing ABs. Unit test against ABs can be developed easily and ABs can even be used in non-JRTF applications. JRTF also provides interfaces allowing JRTF applications to be configured and monitored at runtime. JRTF is compatible with ITER standard FPSC hardware and ITER (Control, Data Access and Communication) CODAC Core software. It can be configured and monitored using (Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System) EPICS. Moreover the JRTF can be ported to different platforms and be integrated with supervisory control software other than EPICS. The paper presents the design and implementation of JRTF as well as brief test results.

The Gamma-Ray Imaging Framework (GRIF) is an open source (LGPL) software framework for creating real-time gamma-ray imaging applications. GRIF is written in C++ using Qt, and uses ROOT and the Boost Graph Library. GRIF provides automatic multi-threading and data management to make it easy to quickly develop power gamma-ray imagining applications. The model for application developers is built around the separation of data acquisition (DAQ) and analysis units. Users are expected to use the APIs for the DAQ and analysis units to build their applications. Memory and data are managed by GRIF, so the user does not need to worry about allocating and de-allocating memory for data or thread management and locking schemes. The user only needs to post data to and read data from the GRIF memory manager. GRIF uses XML configuration files for determining data dependences between DAQ and analysis units in the system. We will give an overview of the first release of GRIF, as well as show example applications that have been built using the framework.

The Data Acquisition Backbone Core (DABC) is a new GSI software framework to run a data acquisition with distributed event building on high performance Linux clusters. Experiment specific front-end electronics is to be integrated to the software by means of hardware interface plug-ins like Device and Transport classes. DABC offers elaborate mechanisms for multiprocessing, buffer management, and dataflow throttling. These are transparently available for all implemented plug-ins. Device plug-ins can link a DABC node to remote readout hardware via network connections like Ethernet. Other Device plug-ins can communicate on the Linux device driver level with custom boards directly inserted at the node. Besides delivering the data input, a DABC Device can also provide control access to the connected hardware. This functionality can be used for setting up, or monitoring the front-ends from the application via DABC parameters and commands. An implementation example is a multipurpose PCI Express Optical Receiver (PEXOR) board developed at GSI. This board features an FPGA and 4 optical links and may be used for various front-ends, depending on the FPGA programming. A kernel driver and the DABC Device plug-in for this board have been developed and tested. They are described here with some performance bench-mark results. As another example, DABC is applied for data taking during test beam times of the Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) experiment from 2008 to 2010. Here the front-end readout controller boards (ROC) were integrated to the DABC hardware interface, both for a UDP based Ethernet protocol, and for optical connections to a custom PCIe board.

A detector-independent toolkit for vertex reconstruction (RAVE = “Reconstruction (of vertices) in Abstract, Versatile Environments”) is presented that allows geometric and kinematic reconstruction of vertices. Both linear and adaptive estimation techniques are covered. Non-Gaussian input data can be handled via the Gaussian-sum technique. Kinematic constraints are taken into account via the Lagrangian formalism. Finally, the toolkit also contains a simple flavor-tagger. Main design goals are ease of use, flexibility for embedding into existing software frameworks, extensibility, and openness. The implementation is based on modern object-oriented techniques, is coded in C++ with interfaces for Java and Python, and follows an open-source approach.

ATLAS is one of the four experiments under construction along the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) ring at CERN. The LHC will produce interactions at a center-of-mass energy equal to radics = 14 TeV with a frequency of 40 MHz. The detector consists of more than 140 million electronic channels. The challenging experimental environment and the extreme detector complexity impose the necessity of a common, scalable, distributed monitoring framework, which can be tuned for optimal use by different ATLAS sub-detectors at the various levels of the ATLAS data flow. This paper presents the architecture of this monitoring software framework and describes its current implementation, which has already been used at the ATLAS beam test activity in 2004. Preliminary performance results, obtained on a computer cluster consisting of 700 nodes, will also be presented, showing that the performance of the current implementation is within the range of the final ATLAS requirements.

Statistical methods play a significant role throughout the life-cycle of physics experiments, being an essential component of physics analysis. The present project in progress aims to develop an object-oriented software Toolkit for statistical data analysis. The Toolkit contains a variety of Goodness-of-Fit (GoF) tests, from Chi-squared to Kolmogorov-Smirnov, to less known, but generally much more powerful tests such as Anderson-Darling, Goodman, Fisz-Cramer-von Mises, Kuiper. Thanks to the component-based design and the usage of the standard abstract interfaces for data analysis, this tool can be used by other data analysis systems or integrated in experimental software frameworks. In this paper we describe the statistical details of the algorithms and the computational features of the Toolkit. With the aim of showing the consistency between the code and the mathematical features of the algorithms, we describe the results we obtained reproducing by means of the Toolkit a couple of Goodness-of-Fit testing examples of relevance in statistics literature.

A generic framework has been developed to allow the rapid development of high-performance real-time applications from coarse grained software components. The intercomponent communication overhead is extremely small. The different applications are assembled under the control of application deployment descriptors. These define what software components to load, what base objects to instantiate and how these objects are named and configured. They also define the interconnect between the instantiated base objects. Complementary development tools guarantee the datatype safety of the component interconnect. A high degree of software reuse enables the pursuit of feature-rich applications with high software quality.

The DataCollection (DC) is a subsystem of the ATLAS Trigger and DAQ system. It is responsible for the movement of event data from the ReadOut subsystem to the Second Level Trigger and to the Event Filter. This functionality is distributed on several software applications running on Linux PCs interconnected with Gigabit Ethernet. For the design and implementation of these applications a common approach has been adopted. This approach leads to the design and implementation of a common DC software framework providing a suite of common services.

Experimenters on over 30 DECnet nodes at Fermilab use software developed, distributed, and maintained by the Data Acquisition Software Group. A general methodology and set of tools have been developed to distribute, use and manage the software on different sites. The methodology and tools are of interest to any group developing and using software on multiple nodes.

Since most CAMAC systems include computers, the generation and maintenance of computer programs may represent a substantial fraction of the effort involved in assembling a CAMAC system. The effort involved can be reduced if standard software can be used, but the generality of the hardware and the variety of computers and interfaces make the production of efficient, general software difficult. Some of the problems and some general approaches to them are discussed below. The NIM Software Working Group has been working on a set of FORTRAN subroutines for use with CAMAC systems. Though the effort is incomplete, it has reached a stage where its implementation is feasible and will prove useful. The working group has therefore concluded that it should be published in this tutorial issue to make it available to prospective users.