NEBULAS A High Performance Data-Driven Event-Building Architecture based on an Asynchronous Self-Routing Packet-Switching Network

RD31 : The project is evaluating a new approach to event building for level-two and level-three processor farms at high rate experiments. It is based on the use of commercial switching fabrics to replace the traditional bus-based architectures used in most previous data acquisition sytems. Switching fabrics permit the construction of parallel, expandable, hardware-driven event builders that can deliver higher aggregate throughput than the bus-based architectures. A standard industrial switching fabric technology is being evaluated. It is based on Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) packet-switching network technology. Commercial, expandable ATM switching fabrics and processor interfaces, now being developed for the future Broadband ISDN infrastructure, could form the basis of an implementation. The goals of the project are to demonstrate the viability of this approach, to evaluate the trade-offs involved in make versus buy options, to study the interfacing of the physics frontend data buffers to such a fabric, and to produce realistic global cost and performance estimates for a data acquisition system based on this approach. These goals are being pursued by computer simulation of the architectures and by the assembly and operation of small demonstrator systems.