High Level Trigger Algorithms Research Articles

Recording and reconstructing 10 billion unbiased b hadron decays in CMS

The CMS experiment has recorded a high-purity sample of 10 billion unbiased b hadron decays. The CMS trigger and data acquisition systems were configured to deliver a custom data stream at an average throughput of 2 GB s−1, which was “parked” prior to reconstruction. The data stream was defined by level-1 and high level trigger algorithms that operated at peak trigger rates in excess of 50 and 5 kHz, respectively. New algorithms have been developed to reconstruct and identify electrons with high efficiency at transverse momenta as low as 0.5 GeV. The trigger strategy and electron reconstruction performance were validated with pilot processing campaigns. The accumulation and reconstruction of this data set, now complete, were delivered without significant impact on the core physics programme of CMS. This unprecedented sample provides a unique opportunity for physics analyses in the flavour sector and beyond.

The ATLAS FTK system: how to improve the physics potential with a tracking trigger

After a very successful data taking run, the ATLAS experiment is being upgraded to cope with the higher luminosity and higher center of mass energy that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will provide in the next years. The Fast Tracker (FTK) trigger system, part of the ATLAS trigger upgrade program, is a highly parallel hardware device processor based on a mixture of advanced technologies. FTK provides global track reconstruction in the full inner silicon detector, with resolution comparable to the offline algorithms, in approximately 100 microseconds, allowing a fast and precise detection of the primary and secondary vertex information. The track and vertex information is then used by the high-level trigger algorithms, allowing highly improved trigger performance for the most difficult signatures, such as b-jets. The expected physics performance of FTK in the harsh environment at high pile-up and high luminosities at LHC Run2 are presented.

The ATLAS Trigger System: Past, Present and Future

The ATLAS trigger has been used very successfully for the online event selection during the first run of the LHC between 2009-2013 at a centre-of-mass energy between 900 GeV and 8 TeV. The trigger system consists of a hardware Level-1 (L1) and a software based high-level trigger (HLT) that reduces the event rate from the design bunch-crossing rate of 40 MHz to an average recording rate of a few hundred Hz.We will briefly review the performance of the ATLAS trigger system during the past data-taking period and point out the challenges for the trigger system during the next LHC run in early 2015 with a smaller bunch spacing, almost twice the centre-of-mass energy and higher peak luminosity. We will show the ongoing improvements and upgrades to the existing system that will ensure an even better performing trigger system despite the harsher machine conditions. This includes changes to the L1 calorimeter trigger, the introduction of a new L1 topological trigger module, improvements in the L1 muon system and the merging of the previously two-level HLT system into a single event filter farm. In addition, we will give an overview of the algorithmic improvements in the various HLT algorithms used to identify leptons, hadrons and global event quantities like missing transverse energy.

File-based data flow in the CMS Filter Farm

During the LHC Long Shutdown 1, the CMS Data Acquisition system underwent a partial redesign to replace obsolete network equipment, use more homogeneous switching technologies, and prepare the ground for future upgrades of the detector front-ends. The software and hardware infrastructure to provide input, execute the High Level Trigger (HLT) algorithms and deal with output data transport and storage has also been redesigned to be completely file- based. This approach provides additional decoupling between the HLT algorithms and the input and output data flow. All the metadata needed for bookkeeping of the data flow and the HLT process lifetimes are also generated in the form of small “documents” using the JSON encoding, by either services in the flow of the HLT execution (for rates etc.) or watchdog processes. These “files” can remain memory-resident or be written to disk if they are to be used in another part of the system (e.g. for aggregation of output data). We discuss how this redesign improves the robustness and flexibility of the CMS DAQ and the performance of the system currently being commissioned for the LHC Run 2.

Performance of the CMS High Level Trigger

The CMS experiment has been designed with a 2-level trigger system. The first level is implemented using custom-designed electronics. The second level is the so-called High Level Trigger (HLT), a streamlined version of the CMS offline reconstruction software running on a computer farm. For Run II of the Large Hadron Collider, the increases in center-of-mass energy and luminosity will raise the event rate to a level challenging for the HLT algorithms. The increase in the number of interactions per bunch crossing, on average 25 in 2012, and expected to be around 40 in Run II, will be an additional complication. We present here the expected performance of the main triggers that will be used during the 2015 data taking campaign, paying particular attention to the new approaches that have been developed to cope with the challenges of the new run. This includes improvements in HLT electron and photon reconstruction as well as better performing muon triggers. We will also present the performance of the improved tracking and vertexing algorithms, discussing their impact on the b-tagging performance as well as on the jet and missing energy reconstruction.

Electrons and photons at High Level Trigger in CMS for Run II

The CMS experiment has been designed with a 2-level trigger system. The first level is implemented using custom-designed electronics. The second level is the so-called High Level Trigger (HLT), a streamlined version of the CMS offline reconstruction software running on a computer farm. For Run II of the Large Hadron Collider, the increase in center-of-mass energy and luminosity will raise the event rate to a level challenging for the HLT algorithms. New approaches have been studied to keep the HLT output rate manageable while maintaining thresholds low enough to cover physics analyses. The strategy mainly relies on porting online the ingredients that have been successfully applied in the offline reconstruction, thus allowing to move HLT selection closer to offline cuts. Improvements in HLT electron and photon definitions will be presented, focusing in particular on: updated clustering algorithm and the energy calibration procedure, new Particle-Flow-based isolation approach and pileup mitigation techniques, and the electron-dedicated track fitting algorithm based on Gaussian Sum Filter.

ATLAS High-Level Trigger performance for calorimeter-based algorithms in LHC Run-I

During Run-I of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN the ATLAS detector recorded more than 26 fb−1 of proton-proton collision events. One of the key components of the ATLAS detector is its trigger system. In order to keep up with the fast-paced evolution of the beam conditions during Run-I, the trigger selection had to be constantly adapted. For most of the calorimeter-based triggers only modest modifications of the thresholds had to be made, given the change in instantaneous luminosity of five orders of magnitude. This was achieved by various improvements in the High-Level Trigger algorithms, in several places abandoning the original RoI-based concept and introducing new features to overcome previous limitations. The excellent performance of both ATLAS and the LHC made possible the discovery of a new particle already during Run-I, the long-sought Higgs boson.

Algorithms, performance, development of the ATLAS High-Level trigger

The ATLAS trigger system has been used for the online event selection for three years of LHC data-taking and is preparing for the next run. The trigger system consists of a hardware level-1 and a software high-level trigger (HLT) which is implemented in a region-of-interest based level-2 stage and a event filter operating after event building with offline-like software. During the past three years, the luminosity and pile-up (number of collisions per beam crossing) has increased significantly placing escalating demands on the rejection and timing performance. The HLT algorithms advanced during this period to maintain and even improve performance. Also discussed is the work towards the merging of the two HLT levels in to a single level HLT.

The CMS High Level Trigger System: Experience and Future Development

The CMS experiment at the LHC features a two-level trigger system. Events accepted by the first level trigger, at a maximum rate of 100 kHz, are read out by the Data Acquisition system (DAQ), and subsequently assembled in memory in a farm of computers running a software high-level trigger (HLT), which selects interesting events for offline storage and analysis at a rate of order few hundred Hz. The HLT algorithms consist of sequences of offline-style reconstruction and filtering modules, executed on a farm of 0(10000) CPU cores built from commodity hardware. Experience from the operation of the HLT system in the collider run 2010/2011 is reported. The current architecture of the CMS HLT, its integration with the CMS reconstruction framework and the CMS DAQ, are discussed in the light of future development. The possible short- and medium-term evolution of the HLT software infrastructure to support extensions of the HLT computing power, and to address remaining performance and maintenance issues, are discussed.

Controlling a Large CPU Farm Using Industrial Tools

<para xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> The LHCb experiment at CERN will have an Event Filter Farm (EFF) composed of 2000 CPUs. These machines will form a pool of 50 sub-farms with 30 to 40 nodes each, running a large amount of High Level Trigger (HLT) tasks in parallel. Although these tasks are identical algorithms, they can run at the same time being configured with different parameters, such as run type (Physics, Cosmics, Test, etc.) or with different subdetectors (partitions). The HLT is the second of the two trigger levels in LHCb. Its selection algorithms reduce the incoming data rate of 1 MHz to an output rate of 2 kHz. Selected events are sent for mass storage and subsequent offline reconstruction and analysis. These trigger processes running online are based on the same software framework as the algorithms for offline analysis (Gaudi). The control of the trigger farm was developed with an industrial SCADA system (PVSS) which is used throughout the Experiment Control System (ECS). The HLT algorithms are handled by the ECS like hardware devices, for instance, high voltage channels. The integration of the HLT controls in the overall ECS, which is modeled as finite state machines, will be presented. </para>

The muon high level trigger of the ATLAS experiment

The ATLAS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been designed and built for new discoveries in High Energy Physics as well as for precision measurements of Standard Model parameters. To satisfy the limited data acquisition and recording capability, at the LHC project luminosity, the ATLAS trigger system must select a very small rate of physically interesting events (~200 Hz) among about 40 million events per second. In the case of events containing muons, as described in this work, the first hardware-based level (Level-1) starts from coincidence of hits in the Muon Spectrometer trigger chambers to select Regions of Interest (RoI) where muons produce significant activity. Such RoIs are used as seeds for the two subsequent trigger levels (Level-2 and Event Filter), running on dedicated online farms, which constitute the High Level Trigger (HLT). This seeding strategy is crucial to drastically reduce the total processing time. Within the Muon HLT, few algorithms are implemented in different steps according to predefined sequences of Feature Extraction (FEX) and Hypothesis (HYPO) algorithms, whose goal is to validate the previously selected muon objects. The ATLAS muon trigger system, thanks to its particular design and to the peculiar structure of the Muon Spectrometer, is able to provide muon stand-alone event trigger decisions, that can be furtherly refined by exploiting the muon information coming from the other ATLAS subdetectors. Muon HLT algorithms are described here in terms of working functionality and performance both on simulated and real data, including non-standard trigger configurations (like cosmic data and LHC start-up scenarios).

Commissioning of the ATLAS high-level trigger with single beam and cosmic rays

ATLAS is one of the two general-purpose detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Using fast reconstruction algorithms, its trigger system needs to efficiently reject a huge rate of background events and still select potentially interesting ones with good efficiency. After a first processing level using custom electronics, the trigger selection is made by software running on two processor farms, designed to have a total of around two thousand multi-core machines. This system is known as the High Level Trigger (HLT). To reduce the network data traffic and the processing time to manageable levels, the HLT uses seeded, step-wise reconstruction, aiming at the earliest possible rejection of background events.The recent LHC startup and short single-beam run provided a “stress test” of the trigger. Following this period, ATLAS continued to collect cosmic-ray events for detector alignment and calibration purposes. These running periods allowed strict tests of the HLT reconstruction and selection algorithms as well as of its configuration and monitoring systems. This facilitated the commissioning of several tracking, muon-finding, and calorimetry algorithms under different running conditions.After an overview of the trigger design, this paper focuses on the experience gained in running the trigger in the fast-changing environment of the detector commissioning. It will emphasize the commissioning of the HLT algorithms, monitoring and configuration.

Commissioning of the CMS High-Level Trigger with cosmic rays

The CMS High-Level Trigger (HLT) is responsible for ensuring that data samples with potentially interesting events are recorded with high efficiency and good quality. This paper gives an overview of the HLT and focuses on its commissioning using cosmic rays. The selection of triggers that were deployed is presented and the online grouping of triggered events into streams and primary datasets is discussed. Tools for online and offline data quality monitoring for the HLT are described, and the operational performance of the muon HLT algorithms is reviewed. The average time taken for the HLT selection and its dependence on detector and operating conditions are presented. The HLT performed reliably and helped provide a large dataset. This dataset has proven to be invaluable for understanding the performance of the trigger and the CMS experiment as a whole.

Tau Tagging methods and HLT Algorithms in the CMS Experiment

The identification techniques of the τ lepton in the CMS experiment based on it's hadronic decay channels are described in detail. The High Level Trigger algorithms developed in the experiment based on τ identification are also presented.

The performance of the CMS tracking

Track and vertex reconstruction in the CMS detector use the information from the silicon pixel and the silicon strip detectors. The track and vertex fitting algorithms are based on the Kalman filter approach. The performance of the tracking procedure is evaluated in terms of efficiency and parameter resolution. The vertex reconstruction performance is reported in terms of primary vertex resolution. Some results obtained with a partial/conditional track reconstruction, used for High-Level Trigger algorithms are also given.