Level Trigger Research Articles

ATLAS Sim@P1 upgrades during long shutdown two

The Simulation at Point1 (Sim@P1) project was built in 2013 to take advantage of the ATLAS Trigger and Data Acquisition High Level Trigger (HLT) farm. The HLT farm provides around 100,000 cores, which are critical to ATLAS during data taking. When ATLAS is not recording data, such as the long shutdowns of the LHC, this large compute resource is used to generate and process simulation data for the experiment. At the beginning of the second long shutdown of the large hadron collider, the HLT farm including the Sim@P1 infrastructure was upgraded. Previous papers emphasised the need for simple, reliable, and efficient tools and assessed various options to quickly switch between data acquisition operation and offline processing. In this contribution, we describe the new mechanisms put in place for the opportunistic exploitation of the HLT farm for offline processing and give the results from the first months of operation.

Paediatric Diagnostic Reference levels in low Resource Settings: A Guide for Developing Country Practitioners with excerpts from ICRP

Background: The practical implementation of Diagnostic Reference Level in paediatric imaging is a complex task due to their unique individuality in terms of high sensitivity to radiation, varying body sizes and presenting pathology. Hence, good knowledge of medical technology, skill to perform patient dosimetry and to analyze mage quality is required. Purpose: To provide a guide on the methodological requirements for the establishment of Paediatric Diagnostic Reference Levels (PiDRLs) based on the revised and updated guidelines from the current ICRP publication 135 on Diagnostic Reference Levels (DRLs). Materials and method: An extensive review of the ICRP report Publication 135 on Diagnostic Reference levels in medical imaging with a focus on paediatric imaging and other related studies were undertaken. Results: The ICRP report 135 updates and refines the recommendations of 2001. It highlights that the application of DRLs in paediatrics alone is not sufficient for the optimization of protection. Image quality must be evaluated. Quantities used for DRLs should be appropriate to the imaging modality being evaluated, assess the amount of ionizing radiation applied to perform a medical imaging task, and be measured directly. For interventional procedures, the complexity of the procedure may be considered in setting DRLs. DRLs shall not be used for individual patients or as trigger (alert or alarm) levels for individual patients. Appropriate weight bands (generally with 5 or 10 kg intervals) are recommended for establishing paediatric DRLs and should be promoted. Conclusion: The amount of radiation used for examinations of children can vary tremendously due to great variation in patient size and weight from neonates to adult-sized adolescents. This variation in patient radiation dose is appropriate. However, variation in patient doses due to inappropriate technique or failure to child-size the imaging protocol is not appropriate. This forms the basis of the new ICRP guideline and should form the basis of developing PiDRLs.

L0TP+: the Upgrade of the NA62 Level-0 Trigger Processor

The L0TP+ initiative is aimed at the upgrade of the FPGA-based Level-0 Trigger Processor (L0TP) of the NA62 experiment at CERN for the post-LS2 data taking, which is expected to happen at 100% of design beam intensity, corresponding to about 3.3 × 1012 protons per pulse on the beryllium target used to produce the kaons beam. Although tests performed at the end of 2018 showed a substantial robustness of the L0TP system also at full beam intensity, there are several reasons to motivate such an upgrade: i) avoid FPGA platform obsolescence, ii) make room for improvements in the firmware design leveraging a more capable FPGA device, iii) add new functionalities, iv) support the 4 beam intensity increase foreseen in future experiment upgrades. We singled out the Xilinx Virtex UltraScale+ VCU118 development board as the ideal platform for the project. L0TP+ seamless integration into the current NA62 TDAQ system and exact matching of L0TP functionalities represent the main requirements and focus of the project; nevertheless, the final design will include additional features, such as a PCIe RDMA engine to enable processing on CPU and GPU accelerators, and the partial reconfiguration of trigger firmware starting from a high level language description (C/C++). The latter capability is enabled by modern High Level Synthesis (HLS) tools, but to what extent this methodology can be applied to perform complex tasks in the L0 trigger, with its stringent latency requirements and the limits imposed by single FPGA resources, is currently being investigated. As a test case for this scenario we considered the online reconstruction of the RICH detector rings on an HLS generated module, using a dedicated primitives data stream with PM hits IDs. Besides, the chosen platform supports the Virtex Ultrascale+ FPGA wide I/O capabilities, allowing for straightforward integration of primitive streams from additional sub-detectors in order to improve the performance of the trigger.

Compass SPMD: a SPMD vectorized tracking algorithm

Compass is a SPMD (Single Program Multiple Data) tracking algorithm for the upcoming LHCb upgrade in 2021. 40 Tb/s need to be processed in real-time to select events. Alternative frameworks, algorithms and architectures are being tested to cope with the deluge of data. Allen is a research and development project aiming to run the full HLT1 (High Level Trigger) on GPUs (Graphics Processing Units). Allen’s architecture focuses on data-oriented layout and algorithms to better exploit parallel architectures. GPUs already proved to exploit the framework efficiently with the algorithms developed for Allen, implemented and optimized for GPU architectures. We explore opportunities for the SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) paradigm in CPUs through the Compass algorithm. We use the Intel SPMD Program Compiler (ISPC) to achieve good readability, maintainability and performance writing “GPU-like” source code, preserving the main design of the algorithm.

Reconstruction of track candidates at the LHC crossing rate using FPGAs

In 2021 the LHCb experiment will be upgraded, and the DAQ system will be based on full reconstruction of events, at the full LHC crossing rate. This requires an entirely new system, capable of reading out, building and reconstructing events at an average rate of 30 MHz. In facing this challenge, the system could take advantage of a fast pre-processing of data on dedicated FPGAs. The results of an R&D on these technologies, developed in the context of the LHCb Upgrade I, are presented in this document. In particular, the details and potential benefits of an approach based on producing in real-time sorted collections of hits in the VELO detector (pre-tracks) are discussed. These pre-processed data can then be used as seeds by the High Level Trigger (HLT) farm to find tracks for the Level 1 trigger with much lower computational effort than possible by starting from the raw detector data, thus freeing an important fraction of the power of the CPU farm for higher level processing tasks.

Scalable monitoring data processing for the LHCb software trigger

The LHCb High Level Trigger (HLT) is split in two stages. HLT1 is synchronous with collisions delivered by the LHC and writes its output to a local disk buffer, which is asynchronously processed by HLT2. Efficient monitoring of the data being processed by the application is crucial to promptly diagnose detector or software problems. HLT2 consists of approximately 50000 processes and 4000 histograms are produced by each process. This results in 200 million histograms that need to be aggregated for each of up to a hundred data taking intervals that are being processed simultaneously. This paper presents the multi-level hierarchical architecture of the monitoring infrastructure put in place to achieve this. Network bandwidth is minimised by sending histogram increments and only exchanging metadata when necessary, using a custom lightweight protocol based on boost::serialize. The transport layer is implemented with ZeroMQ, which supports IPC and TCP communication, queue handling, asynchronous request/response and multipart messages. The persistent storage to ROOT is parallelized in order to cope with data arriving from a hundred of data taking intervals being processed simultaneously by HLT2. The performance and the scalability of the current system are presented. We demonstrate the feasibility of such an approach for the HLT1 use case, where real-time feedback and reliability of the infrastructure are crucial. In addition, a prototype of a high-level transport layer based on the stream-processing platform Apache Kafka is shown, which has several advantages over the lower-level ZeroMQ solution.

The Performance of Belle II High Level Trigger in the First Physics Run

The Belle II experiment is a new generation B-factory experiment at KEK in Japan aiming at the search for New Physics in a huge sample of B-meson decays. The commissioning of the accelerator and the detector for the first physics run has started from March this year. The Belle II High Level Trigger (HLT) is fully working in the beam run. The HLT is now operated with 1600 cores clusterized in 5 units, which is 1/4 of the full configuration. The software trigger is performed using the same offline reconstruction code, and events are classified into a set of physics categories. Only the events in the categories of interest are finally sent out to the storage. Live data quality monitoring is also performed on HLT. For the selected events, the reconstructed tracks are extrapolated to the surface of the pixel detector (PXD) and quickly fed back to the readout electronics for the real time data reduction by sending only the associated hits. The maximum trigger rate in the first physics run was 3.5kHz, and the Belle II data acquisition system was stably operated. There were several problems in the HLT operation, but they have successfully been fixed during the data taking period. The HLT reduction factor is measured to be 8 which is still higher than the design because of the high background environment.

Reconstruction of Charged Particle Tracks in Realistic Detector Geometry Using a Vectorized and Parallelized Kalman Filter Algorithm

One of the most computationally challenging problems expected for the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) is finding and fitting particle tracks during event reconstruction. Algorithms used at the LHC today rely on Kalman filtering, which builds physical trajectories incrementally while incorporating material effects and error estimation. Recognizing the need for faster computational throughput, we have adapted Kalman-filterbased methods for highly parallel, many-core SIMD and SIMT architectures that are now prevalent in high-performance hardware. Previously we observed significant parallel speedups, with physics performance comparable to CMS standard tracking, on Intel Xeon, Intel Xeon Phi, and (to a limited extent) NVIDIA GPUs. While early tests were based on artificial events occurring inside an idealized barrel detector, we showed subsequently that our mkFit software builds tracks successfully from complex simulated events (including detector pileup) occurring inside a geometrically accurate representation of the CMS-2017 tracker. Here, we report on advances in both the computational and physics performance of mkFit, as well as progress toward integration with CMS production software. Recently we have improved the overall efficiency of the algorithm by preserving short track candidates at a relatively early stage rather than attempting to extend them over many layers. Moreover, mkFit formerly produced an excess of duplicate tracks; these are now explicitly removed in an additional processing step. We demonstrate that with these enhancements, mkFit becomes a suitable choice for the first iteration of CMS tracking, and eventually for later iterations as well. We plan to test this capability in the CMS High Level Trigger during Run 3 of the LHC, with an ultimate goal of using it in both the CMS HLT and offline reconstruction for the HL-LHC CMS tracker.

Designing a New Infrastructure for ATLAS Online Web Services

Within the ATLAS detector, the Trigger and Data Acquisition system is responsible for the online processing of data streamed from the detector during collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The online farm is composed of ~4000 servers processing the data read out from ~100 million detector channels through multiple trigger levels. The capability to monitor the ongoing data taking and all the involved applications is essential to debug and intervene promptly to ensure efficient data taking. The base of the current web service architecture was designed a few years ago, at the beginning of the ATLAS operation (Run 1). It was intended to serve primarily static content from a Network-attached Storage, and privileging strict security, using separate web servers for internal (ATLAS Technical and Control Network - ATCN) and external (CERN General Purpose Network and public internet) access. During these years, it has become necessary to add to the static content an increasing number of dynamic web-based User Interfaces, as they provided new functionalities and replaced legacy desktop UIs. These are typically served by applications on VMs inside ATCN and made accessible externally via chained reverse HTTP proxies. As the trend towards Web UIs continues, the current design has shown its limits, and its increasing complexity became an issue for maintenance and growth. It is, therefore, necessary to review the overall web services architecture for ATLAS, taking into account the current and future needs of the upcoming LHC Run 3. In this paper, we present our investigation and roadmap to re-design the web services system to better operate and monitor the ATLAS detector, while maintaining the security of critical services, such as Detector Control System, and maintaining the separation of remote monitoring and on-site control according to ATLAS policies.

Pyroptosis is a critical inflammatory pathway in the placenta from early onset preeclampsia and in human trophoblasts exposed to hypoxia and endoplasmic reticulum stressors

Systemic manifestation of preeclampsia (PE) is associated with circulating factors, including inflammatory cytokines and damage-associated molecular patterns (DAMPs), or alarmins. However, it is unclear whether the placenta directly contributes to the increased levels of these inflammatory triggers. Here, we demonstrate that pyroptosis, a unique inflammatory cell death pathway, occurs in the placenta predominantly from early onset PE, as evidenced by elevated levels of active caspase-1 and its substrate or cleaved products, gasdermin D (GSDMD), IL-1β, and IL-18. Using cellular models mimicking pathophysiological conditions (e.g., autophagy deficiency, hypoxia, and endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress), we observed that pyroptosis could be induced in autophagy-deficient human trophoblasts treated with sera from PE patients as well as in primary human trophoblasts exposed to hypoxia. Exposure to hypoxia elicits excessive unfolded protein response (UPR) and ER stress and activation of the NOD-like receptor pyrin-containing 3 (NLRP3) inflammasome in primary human trophoblasts. Thioredoxin-interacting protein (TXNIP), a marker for hyperactivated UPR and a crucial signaling molecule linked to NLRP3 inflammasome activation, is significantly increased in hypoxia-treated trophoblasts. No evidence was observed for necroptosis-associated events. Importantly, these molecular events in hypoxia-treated human trophoblasts are significantly observed in placental tissue from women with early onset PE. Taken together, we propose that placental pyroptosis is a key event that induces the release of factors into maternal circulation that possibly contribute to severe sterile inflammation and early onset PE pathology.

Automated Detection of Dynamic Earthquake Triggering by the High‐Frequency Power Integral Ratio

AbstractDynamic earthquake triggering can be used to investigate the responses of faults to stress disturbances. We develop a new method to detect dynamic triggering by estimating high‐frequency energy change before and during teleseismic waves using the HIgh‐Frequency power Integral ratio (HiFi). Our method is able to identify local events independent of earthquake catalog or subjective judgements. The significance in energy change is evaluated by a statistical analysis of the background ratio in a large number of days, which can suppress the influence of noise and variations in the background seismicity and yield a confidence level of dynamic triggering (0–1). We apply the HiFi method to the Geysers Geothermal Field in California, and the results are largely consistent with previous reports from the β statistic. By comparing the results of HiFi and β statistic, we select a confidence level range of 0.918–0.947 as the optimum threshold to identify dynamic triggering in the region.

A beam–beam monitoring detector for the MPD experiment at NICA

The Multi-Purpose Detector (MPD) is to be installed at the Nuclotron Ion Collider fAcility (NICA) of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR). Its main goal is to study the phase diagram of the strongly interacting matter produced in heavy-ion collisions. These studies, while providing insight into the physics of heavy-ion collisions, are relevant for improving our understanding of the evolution of the early Universe and the formation of neutron stars. In order to extend the MPD trigger capabilities, we propose to include a high granularity beam–beam monitoring detector (BE–BE) to provide a level-0 trigger signal with an expected time resolution of 30 ps. This new detector will improve the determination of the reaction plane by the MPD experiment, a key measurement for flow studies that provides physics insight into the early stages of the reaction.In this work, we use simulated Au+Au collisions at NICA energies to show the potential of such a detector to determine the event plane resolution, providing further redundancy to the detectors originally considered for this purpose namely, the Fast Forward Detector (FFD) and the Hadron Calorimeter (HCAL). We also show our results for the time resolution studies of two prototype cells carried out at the T10 beam line at the CERN PS complex.

Time Interval Measurement in the Picosecond Accuracy

A model and a laboratory method were developed for determining the major systematic errors affecting time interval measurement (TIM) accuracy. The laboratory method investigates the optimum trigger level for the high slew rate timing pulses that achieves the highest TIM accuracy. The overall errors due to the measurement setup and the trigger level, at which the measurements are executed, are the most considerable sources of systematic errors. Previously these error sources were modeled. In this study the model was modified for estimating more precisely the systematic errors contributed by the measurement setup. Also a laboratory method was experienced to determine the optimum trigger level for the timing pulses. Applying these methods achieve a TIM accuracy in the picosecond range.

Sampling the mu nu SSM for displaced decays of the tau left sneutrino LSP at the LHC

Within the framework of the mu nu mathrm{SSM}, a displaced dilepton signal is expected at the LHC from the decay of a tau left sneutrino as the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP) with a mass in the range 45–100 GeV. We compare the predictions of this scenario with the ATLAS search for long-lived particles using displaced lepton pairs in pp collisions, considering an optimization of the trigger requirements by means of a high level trigger that exploits tracker information. The analysis is carried out in the general case of three families of right-handed neutrino superfields, where all the neutrinos get contributions to their masses at tree level. To analyze the parameter space, we sample the mu nu SSM for a tau left sneutrino LSP with proper decay length ctau > 0.1 , hbox {mm} using a likelihood data-driven method, and paying special attention to reproduce the current experimental data on neutrino and Higgs physics, as well as flavor observables. The sneutrino is special in the mu nu mathrm{SSM} since its couplings have to be chosen so that the neutrino oscillation data are reproduced. We find that important regions of the parameter space can be probed at the LHC run 3.

To catch a long-lived particle: hit selection towards a regional hardware track trigger implementation

Conventional searches for new phenomena at collider experiments tend to focus on prompt particles, produced at the interaction point and decaying rapidly. New physics models including long-lived particles that travel a substantial distance in the detectors before decaying provide an interesting alternative, especially in light of the lack of new phenomena at the current LHC experiments, and could solve unanswered questions of the Standard Model. Long-lived particles have characteristic experimental signatures that, while making them clearly distinct from other processes, also could make them potentially invisible to current data-acquisition methods. Specific trigger strategies need to be in place to target long-lived particles. In this paper, we investigate the use of tracker information at trigger level to identify displaced signatures. We propose two methods that can be implemented at hardware-level: one based on the Hough transform, and another based on pattern matching with patterns trained on displaced tracks.

Status of the present ATLAS RPC system and overview towards HL-LHC

The Resistive Plate Chamber (RPC) system covers the barrel region of the ATLAS muon spectrometer [1] in the pseudo-rapidity range |η|<1.05, with six independent detector layers exclusively providing the first level trigger signal and the track coordinate in the non-bending plane of the muon candidates. The system is designed to operate up to the nominal Large Hadron Collider luminosity ( ℒ = 1034 cm−2 s−1) which has been already exceeded thanks to the excellent performance of the collider. The experience in operating the present RPC system, up to the maximum instantaneous luminosity of 2.06 × 10 34 cm−2 s−1 reached in 2017, is reported. The performance of the system, in the severe background and pileup conditions of the last data taking period, is presented together with the improved tools implemented in order to have an effective monitoring of the detector status. The plans to successfully operate the present system during the HL-LHC phase are also introduced.

Correlations Between Corporate Governance Practices And Financial Performances In Indian Banks

In the last era, Corporate Governance has advanced and developed significantly. Integration and globilisation of the capital markets and financial markets are the important factors for the rapid developments in this arena. It has also made way to the development of more number of corporate scandals (such as corporate accounting scandal at Satyam computer services) or fraud loans by Banks (Punjab National Banks).The study based on correlation, analyses the link between corporate governance disclosure practices and the financial ratios, which in turn leads to a successful governance paradigm accountability. It also aims to study about the financial ratios, which are within the RBI trigger level and find out whether there is any correlation between the movements of share prices and earnings per share of the banks during the study period.

Forest health effects due to atmospheric deposition: Findings from long-term forest health monitoring in the Athabasca Oil Sands Region

Oil sands developments release acidifying compounds (SO2 and NO2) with the potential for acidifying deposition and impacts to forest health. This article integrates the findings presented in the Oil Sands Forest Health Special Issue, which reports on the results of 20 years of forest health monitoring, and addresses the key questions asked by WBEA's Forest Health Monitoring (FHM) Program: 1) is there evidence of deposition affecting the environment?, 2) have there been changes in deposition or effects over time?, 3) do acid deposition levels require management intervention?, 4) what are major sources of deposited substances? and 5) how can the program be improved?Deposition of sulphur, nitrogen, base cations (BC), polycyclic aromatic compounds and trace elements decline exponentially with distance from sources. There is little evidence for acidification effects on forest soils or on understory plant communities or tree growth, but there is evidence of nitrogen accumulation in jack pine needles and fertilization effects on understory plant communities. Sulphur, BC and trace metal concentrations in lichens increased between 2008 and 2014. Source apportionment studies suggest fugitive dust in proximity to mining is a primary source of BC, trace element and organic compound deposition, and BC deposition may be neutralizing acidifying deposition. Sulphur accumulation in soils and nitrogen effects on vegetation may indicate early stages of acidification. Deposition estimates for sites close to emissions sources exceed proposed regulatory trigger levels, suggesting a detailed assessment of acidification risk close to the emission sources is warranted. However, there is no evidence of widespread acidification as suggested by recent modeling studies, likely due to high BC deposition. FHM Program evolution should include continued integration with modeling approaches, ongoing collection and assessment of monitoring data and testing for change over time, and addition of monitoring sites to fill gaps in regional coverage.

Interseismic Quiescence and Triggered Slip of Active Normal Faults of Kīlauea Volcano's South Flank During 2001–2018

AbstractThe mobile south flank of Kīlauea Volcano hosts two normal fault systems, the Koa'e fault system (KFS) and the Hilina fault system (HFS). In historical time, at least three M&gt;6.5 earthquakes have occurred on the basal detachment of the Kīlauea Volcano's south flank, with the most recent being the 4 May 2018 M6.9 earthquake. Here we analyze kinematic Global Positioning System data collected from 2001 to 2017 and interferometric synthetic aperture radar data before, during, and after the 2018 M6.9 earthquake to determine the crustal motion across the HFS and KFS faults. Our results indicate that the HFS faults did not significantly slip during the interseismic period from 2007 to 2011. Despite its substantial magnitude, interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) data show that the 2018 M6.9 earthquake triggered subcentimeter level slip along sections of the previously mapped HFS branches. Up to 20 cm of offset occurred on what appears to be a newly formed (or previously unknown) fault near the eastern end of the HFS. During the 3 months following the M6.9 earthquake, up to ~30 cm of slip occurred along the KFS, which helps accommodate rapid large‐scale subsidence of Kīlauea's summit region as large volumes of summit reservoir magma fed the lower East Rift Zone eruption. The HFS appears to activate only in concert with large earthquakes on the basal detachment. The KFS, on the other hand, moves both seismically during small local earthquakes and aseismically in response to nearby earthquakes and caldera subsidence.

Construction of a concrete segmental arch bridge over a railway

This paper describes the modelling of the behaviour of a large precast concrete segmental arch structure during construction over a main line railway. The main aim of the modelling was to accurately predict the deflections of the segmental arch during construction and to set trigger levels to prevent another failure similar to that which occurred at Gerrards Cross, UK. The failure at Gerrards Cross, reported in 2005, demonstrated the importance of controlling the backfill and carefully controlling and monitoring the deflections of the arch during construction. To enable accurate predictions, finite-difference analysis of the precast segmental structure was utilised, which takes account of the soil–structure interaction effects covering structure and soil stiffness. Many sensitivity analyses were necessary to predict lower and upper bounds using predominant parameters that influenced the behaviour and included the movement of the arches on the piled foundations. Observations taken on site of movements of the arch during construction showed that actual deflections matched the predicted movements to a very high degree.