The ALICE High Level Trigger has to process data online, in order to select interesting (sub)events, or to compress data efficiently by modeling techniques.Focusing on the main data source, the Time Projection Chamber (TPC), we present two pattern recognition methods under investigation: a sequential approach "cluster finder" and "track follower") and an iterative approach ("track candidate finder" and "cluster deconvoluter"). We show, that the former is suited for pp and low multiplicity PbPb collisions, whereas the latter might be applicable for high multiplicity PbPb collisions, if it turns out, that more than 8000 charged particles would have to be reconstructed inside the TPC. Based on the developed tracking schemes we show, that using modeling techniques a compression factor of around 10 might be achievable
The ALICE High-Level Trigger processes data online, to either select interesting (sub-) events, or to compress data efficiently by modeling techniques. Focusing on the main data source, the Time Projection Chamber, the architecure of the system and the current state of the tracking and compression methods are outlined.
The central detectors of the ALICE experiment at LHC will produce a data size of up to 75 MByte/event at an event rate <200 Hz resulting in a data rate of \~15 GByte/sec. This exceeds the foreseen mass storage bandwidth of 1.25 GByte/sec by one order of magnitude. Online processing of the data is necessary in order to select interesting (sub)events ("High Level Trigger"), or to compress data efficiently by modeling techniques. The largest computing challenge is imposed by the TPC, requiring realtime pattern recognition. The work carried out investigates the performance of various pattern recog…
The High Level Trigger (HLT) of the ALICE experiment requires massive parallel computing. One of the main tasks of the HLT system is two-dimensional cluster finding on raw data of the Time Projection Chamber (TPC), which is the main data source of ALICE. To reduce the number of computing nodes needed in the HLT farm, FPGAs, which are an intrinsic part of the system, will be utilized for this task. VHDL code implementing the Fast Cluster Finder algorithm, has been written, a testbed for functional verification of the code has been developed, and the code has been synthesized
At the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, atomic nuclei are collided at ultra-relativistic energies. Many final-state particles are produced in each collision and their properties are measured by the ALICE detector. The detector signals induced by the produced particles are digitized leading to data rates that are in excess of 48 GB/$s$. The ALICE High Level Trigger (HLT) system pioneered the use of FPGA- and GPU-based algorithms to reconstruct charged-particle trajectories and reduce the data size in real time. The results of the reconstruction of the collision events, avai…
The High Level Trigger (HLT) system of the ALICE experiment is an online event filter and trigger system designed for input bandwidths of up to 25 GB/s at event rates of up to 1 kHz. The system is designed as a scalable PC cluster, implementing several hundred nodes. The transport of data in the system is handled by an object-oriented data flow framework operating on the basis of the publisher-subscriber principle, being designed fully pipelined with lowest processing overhead and communication latency in the cluster. In this paper, we report the latest measurements where this framework has be…
The ALICE High Level Trigger has to process data online, in order to select interesting (sub)events, or to compress data efficiently by modeling techniques. Focusing on the main data source, the Time Projection Chamber (TPC), we present two pattern recognition methods under investigation: a sequential approach (cluster finder and track follower) and an iterative approach (track candidate finder and cluster deconvoluter). We show, that the former is suited for pp and low multiplicity PbPb collisions, whereas the latter might be applicable for high multiplicity PbPb collisions of dN/dy>3000. Bas…
ACORDE, the ALICE COsmic Ray DEtector is one of the ALICE detectors, presently under construction. It consists of an array of plastic scintillator counters placed on the three upper faces of the ALICE magnet. This array will act as Level 0 cosmic ray trigger and, together with other ALICE sub-detectors, will provide precise information on cosmic rays with primary energies around $10^{15-17}$ eV. In this paper we will describe the ACORDE detector, trigger design and electronics.
ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is one of four major experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The High Level Trigger (HLT) is a compute cluster, which reconstructs collisions as recorded by the ALICE detector in real-time. It employs a custom online data-transport framework to distribute data and workload among the compute nodes. ALICE employs subdetectors sensitive to environmental conditions such as pressure and temperature, e.g. the Time Projection Chamber (TPC). A precise reconstruction of particle trajectories requires the calibration of these detectors. Performing …
The ALICE experiment at the LHC is equipped with an electromagnetic calorimeter (EMCal) designed to enhance its capabilities for jet, photon and electron measurement. In addition, the EMCal enables triggering on jets and photons with a centrality dependent energy threshold. After its commissioning in 2010, the EMCal Level 1 (L1) trigger was officially approved for physics data taking in 2011. After describing the L1 hardware and trigger algorithms, the commissioning and the first year of running experience, both in proton and heavy ion beams, are reviewed. Additionally, the upgrades to the ori…
The Muon Spectrometer (MS) of the ALICE experiment at LHC is equipped with a HLT (High Level Trigger), whose aim is to improve the accuracy of the trigger cuts delivered at the L0 stage. A computational challenge of real-time event reconstruction is satisfied to achieve this software trigger cut of the HLT. After the description of the online algorithms, the performance of the online tracker is compared with that of the offline tracker using the measured pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}=7$ TeV.
As from the run 3 of CERN LHC scheduled in 2022, the upgraded ALICE experiment will use a Common Readout Unit (CRU) at the heart of the data acquisition system. The CRU, based on the PCIe40 hardware designed for LHCb, is a common interface between 3 main sub-systems: the front-end, the computing system, and the trigger and timing system. The 475 CRUs will interface 10 different sub-detectors and reduce the total data throughput from 3.5 TB/s to 635 GB/s. The ALICE common firmware framework supports data taking in continuous and triggered mode and forwards clock, trigger and slow control to the…
The ALICE detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) consists of a central barrel, a muon spectrometer, zero degree calorimeters and additional detectors which are used for trigger purposes and for event classification. The main detector systems of relevance for measuring diffractive and electromagnetic processes are described. The trigger strategy for such measurements is outlined. The physics potential of studying diffractive and electromagnetic processes at the LHC is presented by discussing possible signatures of the Odderon.
The ALICE experiment at the LHC is equipped with an electromagnetic calorimeter (EMCal) designed to enhance its capabilities for jet measurement. In addition, the EMCal enables triggering on high energy jets. Based on the previous development made for the Photon Spectrometer (PHOS) level-0 trigger, a specific electronic upgrade was designed in order to allow fast triggering on high energy jets (level-1). This development was made possible by using the latest generation of FPGAs which can deal with the instantaneous incoming data rate of 26 Gbit/s and process it in less than 4 μs.
ALICE (A Large Heavy Ion Experiment) is one of the four large scale experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The High Level Trigger (HLT) is an online computing farm, which reconstructs events recorded by the ALICE detector in real-time. The most compute-intense task is the reconstruction of the particle trajectories. The main tracking devices in ALICE are the Time Projection Chamber (TPC) and the Inner Tracking System (ITS). The HLT uses a fast GPU-accelerated algorithm for the TPC tracking based on the Cellular Automaton principle and the Kalman filter. ALICE employs gaseous s…
A dedicated front-end electronics has been developed for the trigger chambers of the ALICE muon spectrometer which will work at the future LHC at CERN. These trigger chambers are based on RPCs (Resistive Plate Chambers) working in streamer mode. The number of electronics channels (about 21000) and the fact that RPC pulsed signals have specific characteristics have led to design a 8 channels front-end ASIC using a new discrimination technique. The principle of the ASIC is described and the radiation hardness is discussed. Special emphasis is put on production characteristics of about 4000 chips…
The ALICE Central Trigger Processor (CTP) is going to be upgraded for LHC Run 3 with completely new hardware and a new Trigger and Timing Control (TTC-PON) system based on a Passive Optical Network (PON) system. The new trigger system has been designed as dead time free and able to transmit trigger data at 9.6 Gbps. A new universal trigger board has been designed, where by changing the FMC card, it can function as a CTP or as a LTU. It is based on the Xilinx Kintex Ultrascale FPGA and upgraded TTC-PON. The new trigger system and the prototype of the trigger board will be presented.
ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) studies the transition of nuclear matter to a deconfined phase known as Quark Gluon Plasma, in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions at the LHC. ALICE is equipped with a muon spectrometer for the detection of quarkonia and heavy flavour particles. The trigger system of the spectrometer consists of 72 RPCs arranged in four detection planes, with a total area of 140 m^{2}. In the first three years of LHC operation, the muon trigger system was fully operational in data-taking in pp, Pb-Pb and p-Pb collisions. The RPC performance and stability throughout t…
The ALICE muon spectrometer studies the production of quarkonia and open heavy- flavour particles. It is equipped with a Trigger System composed of Resistive Plate Chambers which, by applying a transverse-momentum-based muon selection, minimises the background from light-hadron decays. The system has been continuously taking data throughout the LHC Run I; it has undergone maintenance and consolidation operations during the LHC shutdown period 1. In the first year of the LHC Run II, the system, fully recommissioned, has participated in data taking in pp and Pb/en-dashPb collisions. The performa…
ALICE (A Large Heavy Ion Experiment) is one of the four major experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The High Level Trigger (HLT) is an online compute farm which reconstructs events measured by the ALICE detector in real-time. The most compute-intensive part is the reconstruction of particle trajectories called tracking and the most important detector for tracking is the Time Projection Chamber (TPC). The HLT uses a GPU-accelerated algorithm for TPC tracking that is based on the Cellular Automaton principle and on the Kalman filter. The GPU tracking has been running in 24/7 op…
The Transition Radiation Detector (TRD) was designed and built to enhance the capabilities of the ALICE detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). While aimed at providing electron identification and triggering, the TRD also contributes significantly to the track reconstruction and calibration in the central barrel of ALICE. In this paper the design, construction, operation, and performance of this detector are discussed. A pion rejection factor of up to 410 is achieved at a momentum of 1 GeV/$c$ in p-Pb collisions and the resolution at high transverse momentum improves by about 40% when inc…
The ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) detector yields a huge sample of data from different sub-detectors. On-line data processing is applied to select and reduce the volume of the stored data. ALICE applies a multi-level hardware trigger scheme where fast detectors are used to feed a three-level (L0, L1, and L2) deep chain. The High-Level Trigger (HLT) is a fourth filtering stage sitting logically between the L2 trigger and the data acquisition event building. The EMCal detector comprises a large area electromagnetic calorimeter that extends the momentum measurement of photons and neutra…
ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) experiment at CERN LHC is designed to study the properties of the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) in heavy-ion collisions. In 2019-2020 the upgrade of CERN LHC will increase the luminosity and the collision rate beyond the design parameters of the current ALICE setup. To be able to benefit from the improved performance of the LHC, ALICE will upgrade several of its key detector systems including the Fast Interaction Trigger (FIT) [2]. FIT is designed to provide the functionality of the old forward detectors while retaining or even improving their performance. It…
A major upgrade of the ALICE experiment is in progress and will result in high-rate data taking during LHC Run 3 (2022-2024). The LHC interaction rate at Point 2 where the ALICE experiment is located will be increased to $50\ \mathrm{kHz}$ in Pb--Pb collisions and $1\ \mathrm{MHz}$ in pp collisions. The ALICE experiment will be able to read out data at these interaction rates leading to an increase of the collected luminosity by a factor of up to about 100 with respect to LHC Runs 1 and 2. To satisfy these requirements, a new readout system has been developed for most of the ALICE detectors, a…
The ALICE Muon IDentifier is composed of 72 single-gap bakelite Resistive Plate Chambers, which have been operational since 2009 in maxi-avalanche mode (discrimination threshold:7 mV without amplification) with a Tetrafluoroethane/Isobutane/Sulfur Hexafluoride gas mixture, undergoing counting rates of the order of tens of Hz/cm^2. In this talk, the long-term performance and stability of the RPC system will be discussed, in terms of efficiency, dark current and dark rate. An assessment of potential signs of ageing observed on the detectors will be presented, together with a summary of the most …
We discuss how a level-1 trigger, about 8 us after a hadron-hadron collision, can be derived from the Transition Radiation Detector (TRD) in A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE) at the LHC. Chamber-wise track segments from fast on-detector reconstruction are read out with position, angle and electron likelihood. In the Global Tracking Unit up to 6 tracklets from a particle traversing the detector layers are matched and used for the reconstruction of transverse momentum and electron identification. Such tracks form the basis for versatile and flexible trigger conditions, e.g. single high-pt …
During the upcoming Run 3 and Run 4 at the LHC the upgraded ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) will operate at a significantly higher luminosity and will collect two orders of magnitude more events than in Run 1 and Run 2. A part of the ALICE upgrade is the new Fast Interaction Trigger (FIT). This thoroughly redesigned detector combines, in one system, the functionality of the four forward detectors used by ALICE during the LHC Run 2: T0, V0, FMD and AD. The FIT will monitor luminosity and background, provide feedback to the LHC, and generate minimum bias, vertex and centrality triggers, …
The ALICE Muon Trigger is currently yielded by a detector currently composed of 72 Bakelite single-gap Resistive Plate Chambers operated in maxi-avalanche mode, arranged in four 5.5x6.5 m2 detection planes. In order to meet the requirements posed by the forthcoming LHC high luminosity runs starting from 2021 onwards, in which ALICE will be read out in continuous mode, the Muon Trigger will become a Muon Identifier and will undergo a major upgrade. In the current setup, signals from about 21k strips are discriminated by 2400 non-amplified Front End (FEE) cards, whose thresholds are provided by …
The Silicon Pixel Detector (SPD) constitutes the two innermost layers of the Inner Tracking System of the ALICE experiment and it is the closest detector to the interaction point. As a vertex detector, it has the unique feature of generating a trigger signal that contributes to the L0 trigger of the ALICE experiment. The SPD started collecting data since the very first pp collisions at LHC in 2009 and since then it has taken part in all pp, Pb-Pb and p-Pb data taking campaigns. This contribution will present the main features of the SPD, the detector performance and the operational experience,…
The forward muon spectrometer of ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is equipped with a trigger system made of four planes of Resistive Plate Chambers (RPC), arranged in two stations with two planes each, for a total area of about 140 m2 . The system provides single and di-muon triggers with suitable transverse momentum selection, optimised for the physics of quarkonia and open heavy flavour. In the first two years of data-taking at the Large Hadron Collider (2010 and 2011) the 72 RPCs were operated in highly saturated avalanche mode in both pp and Pb-Pb collisions. The integrated charge w…
A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE) at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN went through a major upgrade in which some of its subdetectors were replaced with new ones, while others are equipped with new electronics. The aim of the upgrade is to withstand higher collision rates during the third running period (Run 3), which started in 2022. As part of the upgrade, certain subdetectors such as the Muon Trigger, renamed to Muon Identifier, now operate in a continuous, triggerless readout mode, in addition to the previous triggered readout mode. Due to the increased quantity of data, typica…
The ALICE experiment at CERN is preparing for a major upgrade for the third phase of data taking run (Run 3), when the high luminosity phase of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) starts. The increase in the beam luminosity will result in high interaction rate causing the data acquisition rate to exceed 3 TB/sec. In order to acquire data for all the events and to handle the increased data rate, a transition in the readout electronics architecture from the triggered to the trigger-less acquisition mode is required. In this new architecture, a dedicated electronics block called the Common Readout Un…
ALICE (A Large Heavy Ion Experiment) is one of the four major experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, which is today the most powerful particle accelerator worldwide. The High Level Trigger (HLT) is an online compute farm of about 200 nodes, which reconstructs events measured by the ALICE detector in real-time. The HLT uses a custom online data-transport framework to distribute data and workload among the compute nodes. ALICE employs several calibration-sensitive subdetectors, e.g. the TPC (Time Projection Chamber). For a precise reconstruction, the HLT has to perform the calib…
ALICE will significantly increase its Pb--Pb data taking rate from the 1\,kHz of triggered readout in Run 2 to 50 kHz of continuous readout for LHC Run 3. Updated tracking detectors are installed for Run 3 and a new two-phase computing strategy is employed. In the first synchronous phase during the data taking, the raw data is compressed for storage to an on-site disk buffer and the required data for the detector calibration is collected. In the second asynchronous phase the compressed raw data is reprocessed using the final calibration to produce the final reconstruction output. Traditional C…
A Time Projection Chamber (TPC) is a powerful detector for 3-dimensional tracking and particle identification for ultra-high multiplicity events. It is the central tracking device of many experiments, e.g. the ALICE experiment at CERN. The necessity of a switching electrostatic gate, which prevents ions produced in the amplification region o MWPCs from entering the drift volume, however, restricts its application to trigger rates of the order of 1 kHz. Charge amplification by Gas Electron Multiplier (GEM) foils instead of proportional wires offers an intrinsic suppression of the ion backflow, …
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is undergoing a major upgrade with the goal of increasing the luminosity as more statistics are needed for precision measurements. The presented work pertains to the corresponding upgrade of the ALICE Muon Trigger (MTR) Detector, now named the Muon Identifier (MID). Previously operated in a triggered readout manner, this detector has transitioned to continuous readout with time-delimited data payloads. However, this results in data rates much higher than the previous operation and hence a new Online-Offline (O2) computing system is also being developed f…
An FPGA-based online trigger system has been developed for the COMET Phase-I experiment. This experiment searches for muon-to-electron conversion, which has never been observed yet. A drift chamber and trigger counters detect a mono-energetic electron from the conversion process in a 1-T solenoidal magnetic field. A highly intense muon source is applied to reach unprecedented experimental sensitivity. It also generates undesirable background particles, and a trigger rate due to these particles is expected to be much higher than an acceptable trigger rate in the data acquisition system. By usin…
The ALICE detector at the LHC (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) will carry out comprehensive measurements of high energy nucleus-nucleus collisions, in order to study QCD matter under extreme conditions and the phase transtion between conïned matter and the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). This report presents our current state of understanding of the Physics Performance of the large acceptance Electromagnetic Calorimeter (EMCal) in the ALICE central detector. The EMCal enhances ALICE's capabilities for jet measurements. The EMCal enables triggering and full reconstruction of high energy jets in ALIC…
ALICE Overwatch is a project started in late 2015 to provide augmented online monitoring and data quality assurance utilizing time-stamped QA histograms produced by the ALICE High Level Trigger. The system receives the data via ZeroMQ, stores it for later review, enriches it with detector specific functionality, and visualizes it via a web application. These provided capabilities are complementary to the existing Data Quality Monitoring system. In addition to basic visualization, additional processing options are accessible to the user, including requests for data within a particular time rang…
In LHC Run 3, ALICE will increase the data taking rate significantly to continuous readout of 50 kHz minimum bias Pb-Pb collisions. The reconstruction strategy of the online offline computing upgrade foresees a first synchronous online reconstruction stage during data taking enabling detector calibration, and a posterior calibrated asynchronous reconstruction stage. We present a tracking algorithm for the Time Projection Chamber (TPC), the main tracking detector of ALICE. The reconstruction must yield results comparable to current offline reconstruction and meet the time constraints like in th…
In LHC Run 3, ALICE will increase the data taking rate significantly, from an approximately 1 kHz trigger readout in minimum-bias Pb--Pb collisions to a 50 kHz continuous readout rate. The reconstruction strategy of the online-offline computing upgrade foresees a synchronous online reconstruction stage during data taking, which generates the detector calibration, and a posterior calibrated asynchronous reconstruction stage. The huge amount of data requires a significant compression in order to store all recorded events. The aim is a factor 20 compression of the TPC data, which is one of the ma…
The ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) proposes major detector upgrades to fully exploit the increase of the luminosity of the LHC in RUN~3 and to extend the physics reach for rare probes at low transverse momentum. The Time Projection Chamber (TPC) is one of the main tracking and PID devices in the central barrel of ALICE. The maximum trigger rate of the TPC is currently limited to about 3.5 kHz by the operation of a gating grid system. In order to make full use of the luminosity in RUN 3, the TPC is foreseen to be operated in an ungated mode with continuous readout. The exis…
The design, construction, and commissioning of the ALICE Time-Projection Chamber (TPC) is described. It is the main device for pattern recognition, tracking, and identification of charged particles in the ALICE experiment at the CERN LHC. The TPC is cylindrical in shape with a volume close to 90 m^3 and is operated in a 0.5 T solenoidal magnetic field parallel to its axis. In this paper we describe in detail the design considerations for this detector for operation in the extreme multiplicity environment of central Pb--Pb collisions at LHC energy. The implementation of the resulting requiremen…
In LHC Run 3, ALICE will increase the data taking rate significantly to 50\,kHz continuous read out of minimum bias Pb-Pb events. This challenges the online and offline computing infrastructure, requiring to process 50 times as many events per second as in Run 2, and increasing the data compression ratio from 5 to 20. Such high data compression is impossible by lossless ZIP-like algorithms, but it must use results from online reconstruction, which in turn requires online calibration. These important online processing steps are the most computing-intense ones, and will use GPUs as hardware acce…
We explore the Micron Automata Processor (AP) as a suitable commodity technology that can address the growing computational needs of pattern recognition in High Energy Physics (HEP) experiments. A toy detector model is developed for which an electron track confirmation trigger based on the Micron AP serves as a test case. Although primarily meant for high speed text-based searches, we demonstrate a proof of concept for the use of the Micron AP in a HEP trigger application.
The ALICE Collaboration will undertake a major upgrade of the detector apparatus during the second LHC Long Shutdown LS2 (2019-2020) in view of the Runs 3 and 4 (2021-2029). The objective of the upgrade is two-fold: i) an improvement of the tracking precision and efficiency, in particular in the low-momentum range; ii) an improvement of the readout capabilities of the experiment, in order to fully exploit the luminosity for heavy ions envisaged after LS2. The first goal will be achieved by replacing the Inner Tracking System with a new tracker, composed of seven layers of silicon pixel detecto…
The CDF experiment's Silicon Vertex Trigger is a system of 150 custom 9U VME boards that reconstructs axial tracks in the CDF silicon strip detector in a 15 microsecond pipeline. SVT's 35 micron impact parameter resolution enables CDF's Level 2 trigger to distinguish primary and secondary particles, and hence to collect large samples of hadronic bottom and charm decays. We review some of SVT's key design features. Speed is achieved with custom VLSI pattern recognition, linearized track fitting, pipelining, and parallel processing. Testing and reliability are aided by built-in logic state analy…
With the planned addition of tracking information to the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Level-1 trigger for the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC), the trigger algorithms can be completely reconceptualized. We explore the feasibility of using particle flow-like reconstruction and pileup per particle identification (PUPPI) pileup mitigation at the hardware trigger level. This represents a new type of multi-subdetector pattern recognition challenge for the HL-LHC. We present proof-of-principle studies on both physics and hardware-resource performance of a prototype algorithm for use by …
Extremely fast pattern recognition capabilities are necessary to find and fit billions of tracks at the hardware trigger level produced every second anticipated at high luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) running conditions. Associative Memory (AM) based approaches for fast pattern recognition have been proposed as a potential solution to the tracking trigger. However, at the HL-LHC, there is much less time available and speed performance must be improved over previous systems while maintaining a comparable number of patterns. The Vertically Integrated Pattern Recognition Associative Memory (VIPRAM) Proje…
