A 1 MHz transaction processor farm for high energy physics

This paper addresses design, simulation and prototypes for a cluster of 150-200 PCs connected by a high speed low latency interconnect such as SCI. The system is designed to handle 3 kByte data packets at rates of 1MHz. A scheme for achievinng these rates without any load on the host CPU will be presented. The purpose of the system is to serve as a possible implementation of a software based trigger for the LHCb experiment. LHCb is a high energy physics experiment at CERN which will start producing data with a rate of 40 TByte/sec in 2005. To analyze the data a multi stage trigger system taht reduces the data step by step has to be build. However, the obtained results are also relevant for other areas of parallel computing lik OLTP.