Highly Parallelized Pattern Matching Hardware for Fast Tracking at Hadron Colliders
Saverio Citraro, A. Annovi, N. V. Biesuz, P. Giannetti, Pierluigi Luciano, Hikmat Nasimi, M. Piendibene, C. L. Sotiropoulou, G. Volpi · IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science · 2016
A high-performance “pattern matching” implementation based on the Associative Memory (AM) system is presented. It is designed to solve the real-time hit-to-track association problem for particles produced in high-energy physics experiments at hadron colliders. The processing time of pattern recognition in CPU-based algorithms increases rapidly with the detector occupancy due to the limited computing power and input-output capacity of hardware available on the market. The AM system presented here solves the problem by being able to process even the most complex hadron collider events produced at a rate of 100 kHz with an average latency smaller than 10 μs. The board built for this goal is able to execute ~12 petabyte comparisons per second, with peak power consumption below 250 W, uniformly distributed on the large area of the board.