Time-based Cellular Automaton track finder for the CBM experiment

Abstract

The future heavy-ion experiment CBM (FAIR/GSI, Darmstadt, Germany) will focus on the measurement of rare probes at interaction rates up to 10 MHz with data flow of up to 1 TB/s. The beam will provide free stream of particles without bunch structure. That requires full online event reconstruction and selection not only in space, but also in time, so- called 4D event building and selection. This is a task of the First-Level Event Selection (FLES) package. The FLES reconstruction and selection package consists of several modules: track finding, track fitting, short-lived particles finding, event building and event selection. The input data are distributed within the FLES farm in a form of so-called time-slices, in which time length is proportional to a compute power of a processing node. A time-slice is reconstructed in parallel between cores within a CPU, thus minimising communication between CPUs. After all tracks of the whole time-slice are found and fitted, they are collected into clusters of tracks originated from common primary vertices. After that short-lived particles are found and the full event building process is finished.