The Terabit/s Super-Fragment Builder and Trigger Throttling System for the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment at CERN

The Data Acquisition System of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the Large Hadron Collider reads out event fragments of an average size of 2 kilobytes from around 650 detector front-ends at a rate of up to 100 kHz. The first stage of event-building is performed by the Super-Fragment Builder employing custom-built electronics and a Myrinet optical network. It reduces the number of fragments by one order of magnitude, thereby greatly decreasing the requirements for the subsequent event-assembly stage. By providing fast feedback from any of the front-ends to the trigger, the Trigger Throttling System prevents buffer overflows in the front-end electronics due to variations in the size and rate of events or due to back-pressure from the down-stream event-building and processing. This paper reports on new performance measurements and on the recent successful integration of a scaled-down setup of the described system with the trigger and with front-ends of all major sub-detectors. The on-going commissioning of the full-scale system is discussed.