NOvA Event Building, Buffering and Data-Driven Triggering From Within the DAQ System

Abstract

The NOvA experiment is a long baseline neutrino experiment design to make precision probes of the structure of neutrino mixing. The experiment features a unique deadtimeless data acquisition system that is capable acquiring and building an event data stream from the continuous readout of the more than 360,000 far detector channels. In order to achieve its physics goals the experiment must be able to buffer, correlate and extract the data in this stream with the beam-spills that occur that Fermilab. In addition the NOvA experiment seeks to enhance its data collection efficiencies for rare class of event topologies that are valuable for calibration through the use of data driven triggering.The NOvA-DDT is a prototype Data-Driven Triggering system. NOvA-DDT has been developed using the Fermilab artdaq generic DAQ/Event-building toolkit. This toolkit provides the advantages of sharing online software infrastructure with other Intensity Frontier experiments, and of being able to use any offline analysis module-unchanged-as a component of the online triggering decisions. We have measured the performance and overhead of NOvA-DDT framework using a Hough transform based trigger decision module developed for the NOvA detector to identify cosmic rays. The results of these tests which were run on the NOvA prototype near detector, yielded a mean processing time of 98 ms per event, while consuming only 1/16th of the available processing capacity. These results provide a proof of concept that a NOvA-DDT based processing system is a viable strategy for data acquisition and triggering for the NOvA far detector.