ATCA-based computation platform for data acquisition and triggering in particle physics experiments
Ming Liu, Johannes Lang, Shuo Yang, Tiago Perez, W. Kuehn, Hao Xu, Dapeng Jin, Qiang Wang, Lu Li, Zhenan Liu, Zhonghai Lu, Axel Jantsch · 2008
An ATCA-based computation platform for data acquisition and trigger applications in nuclear and particle physics experiments has been developed. Each compute node (CN) which appears as a field replaceable unit (FRU) in an ATCA shelf, features 5 Xilinx Virtex-4 FX60 FPGAs and up to 10 GBytes DDR2 memory. Connectivity is provided with 8 optical links and 5 Gigabit Ethernet ports, which are mounted on each board to receive data from detectors and forward results to outer shelves or PC farms with attached mass storage. Fast point-to-point on-board interconnections between FPGAs as well as the full-mesh shelf backplane provide flexibility and high bandwidth to partition algorithms and correlate results among them. The system represents a highly reconfigurable and scalable solution for multiple applications.