Compression of TPC Data in the ALICE Experiment

In this paper two algorithms for the compression of the data generated by the Time Projection Chamber (TPC) detector of the ALICE experiment at CERN are described. The first algorithm is based on a lossless source code modelling technique, i.e. the original TPC signal information can be reconstructed without errors at the decompression stage. The source model exploits the temporal correlation that is present in the TPC data to reduce the entropy of the source. The second algorithm is based on a source model which is lossy if samples of the TPC signal are considered one by one. Conversely, the source model is lossless or quasi-lossless if some physical quantities that are of main interest for the experiment are considered. These quantities are the area and the location of the center of mass of each TPC signal pulse. Obviously entropy coding is applied to the set of events defined by the two source models to reduce the bit rate to the corresponding source entropy. Using TPC simulated data according to the expected ALICE TPC performance, the lossless and the lossy compression algorithms achieve a data reduction respectively to 49.2% and in the range of 34.2% down to 23.7% of the original data rate. The number of operations per input symbol required to implement the compression stage for both algorithms is relatively low, so that a real-time implementation embedded in the TPC data acquisition chain using low-cost integrated electronics is a realistic option to effectively reduce the data storing cost of ALICE experiment.