Abstract
Large liquid argon (LAr) time projection chambers (TPCs) have been adopted for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) experiment's far detector, which will be composed of four 17-kton detectors situated 1.5 km underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility. This represents a large increase in scale compared to existing experiments. Both single- and dual-phase technologies will be validated at CERN, in cryostats capable of accommodating full-size detector modules, and exposed to low-energy charged particle beams. This program, called ProtoDUNE, also allows for extensive tests of data acquisition strategies. The Front-End LInk eXchange (FELIX) readout system was initially developed within the ATLAS collaboration and is based on custom field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based Peripheral Component Interconnect Express input/output cards, connected through point-to-point links to the detector front end and hosted in commodity servers. FELIX will be used in the single-phase ProtoDUNE setup to read the data coming from 2560 anode wires organized in a single anode plane assembly (APS) structure. With a continuous readout at a sampling rate of 2 MHz, the system must deal with an input rate of 96 Gb/s. An external trigger will preselect time windows of 5 ms with interesting activity expected inside the detector. Event building will occur for triggered events, at a target rate of 25 Hz; the readout system will form fragments from the data samples matching the time window, carry out lossless compression, and forward the data to event building nodes over 10-Gb/s Ethernet. This paper discusses the design and implementation of this readout system as well as the first operational experience.
Highlights
P ROTODUNE-SP [1] is the single-phase Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) far detector prototype that is under construction and will be operated at the Manuscript received December 11, 2018; revised February 19, 2019; accepted March 5, 2019
cold electronics (CE) data are received on the warm interface boards (WIBs) which are situated on the top of the flanges
The main driver of the Front-End LInk eXchange (FELIX) concept is the firm belief that a thin interface managing the interaction with detector front-end links and injecting data into commodity servers at an early stage of the Data acquisition (DAQ) chain provides the flexibility that is required for the optimization and maintenance of long-term and long-lifetime systems
Summary
P ROTODUNE-SP [1] is the single-phase Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) far detector prototype that is under construction and will be operated at the Manuscript received December 11, 2018; revised February 19, 2019; accepted March 5, 2019. Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Each anode plane is constructed of three adjacent anode plane assemblies (APAs) that are each 6 m high by 2.3 m wide in the installed position. The readout of the TPC wires, prior to being received by the data acquisition (DAQ) system, consists of cold electronics (CE) mounted on the APAs inside the cryostat and the warm. CE data are received on the warm interface boards (WIBs) which are situated on the top of the flanges. The alternative system described here allows the collaboration to explore less costly solutions by making use of recent advances in commodity computing; it is based on the Front-End LInk eXchange (FELIX) [3] technology and is used to receive the data from the remaining APA
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