Effects of Adaptive Wormhole Routing in Event Builder Networks

The data acquisition system of the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider features a two-stage event builder, which combines data from about 500 sources into full events at an aggregate throughput of 100 GByte/s. To meet the requirements, several architectures and interconnect technologies have been quantitatively evaluated. Both Gigabit Ethernet and Myrinet networks will be employed during the first run. Nearly full bi-section throughput can be obtained using a custom software driver for Myrinet based on barrel shifter traffic shaping. This paper discusses the use of Myrinet dual-port network interface cards supporting channel bonding to achieve virtual 5GBit/s links with adaptive routing to alleviate the throughput limitations associated with wormhole routing. Adaptive routing is not expected to be suitable for high-throughput event builder applications in high-energy physics. To corroborate this claim, results from the CMS event builder preseries installation at CERN are presented and the problems of wormhole routing networks are discussed.