Innovations in trigger and data acquisition systems for next-generation physics facilities
This work tackles critical infrastructure problems for data-intensive physics facilities, particularly at the energy and intensity frontiers, but it is incremental as it focuses on highlighting existing challenges rather than proposing new solutions.
The paper addresses the challenges of designing and operating trigger and data acquisition systems for next-generation physics facilities, which must handle raw data bandwidths exceeding 100 TB/s from over 300 million sensors and achieve data filtering ratios of 1 in 10^5.
Data-intensive physics facilities are increasingly reliant on heterogeneous and large-scale data processing and computational systems in order to collect, distribute, process, filter, and analyze the ever increasing huge volumes of data being collected. Moreover, these tasks are often performed in hard real-time or quasi real-time processing pipelines that place extreme constraints on various parameters and design choices for those systems. Consequently, a large number and variety of challenges are faced to design, construct, and operate such facilities. This is especially true at the energy and intensity frontiers of particle physics where bandwidths of raw data can exceed 100 TB/s of heterogeneous, high-dimensional data sourced from 300M+ individual sensors. Data filtering and compression algorithms deployed at these facilities often operate at the level of 1 part in $10^5$, and once executed, these algorithms drive the data curation process, further highlighting the critical roles that these systems have in the physics impact of those endeavors. This White Paper aims to highlight the challenges that these facilities face in the design of the trigger and data acquisition instrumentation and systems, as well as in their installation, commissioning, integration and operation, and in building the domain knowledge and technical expertise required to do so.