2 research outputs found
Management, Optimization and Evolution of the LHCb Online Network
The LHCb experiment is one of the four large particle detectors running at the
Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. It is a forward single-arm spectrometer dedicated to test the Standard Model through precision measurements of
Charge-Parity (CP) violation and rare decays in the b quark sector. The LHCb
experiment will operate at a luminosity of 2x10^32cm-2s-1, the proton-proton
bunch crossings rate will be approximately 10 MHz. To select the interesting
events, a two-level trigger scheme is applied: the rst level trigger (L0) and the
high level trigger (HLT). The L0 trigger is implemented in custom hardware,
while HLT is implemented in software runs on the CPUs of the Event Filter
Farm (EFF). The L0 trigger rate is dened at about 1 MHz, and the event size
for each event is about 35 kByte. It is a serious challenge to handle the resulting
data rate (35 GByte/s).
The Online system is a key part of the LHCb experiment, providing all the
IT services. It consists of three major components: the Data Acquisition (DAQ)
system, the Timing and Fast Control (TFC) system and the Experiment Control
System (ECS). To provide the services, two large dedicated networks based on
Gigabit Ethernet are deployed: one for DAQ and another one for ECS, which are
referred to Online network in general. A large network needs sophisticated monitoring for its successful operation. Commercial network management systems are
quite expensive and dicult to integrate into the LHCb ECS. A custom network
monitoring system has been implemented based on a Supervisory Control And
Data Acquisition (SCADA) system called PVSS which is used by LHCb ECS. It
is a homogeneous part of the LHCb ECS. In this thesis, it is demonstrated how
a large scale network can be monitored and managed using tools originally made
for industrial supervisory control.
The thesis is organized as the follows:
Chapter 1 gives a brief introduction to LHC and the B physics on LHC,
then describes all sub-detectors and the trigger and DAQ system of LHCb from
structure to performance.
Chapter 2 first introduces the LHCb Online system and the dataflow, then
focuses on the Online network design and its optimization.
In Chapter 3, the SCADA system PVSS is introduced briefly,
then the
architecture and implementation of the network monitoring system are described
in detail, including the front-end processes, the data communication and the
supervisory layer.
Chapter 4 first discusses the packet sampling theory and one of the packet
sampling mechanisms: sFlow, then demonstrates the applications of sFlow for
the network trouble-shooting, the traffic monitoring and the anomaly detection.
In Chapter 5, the upgrade of LHC and LHCb is introduced, the possible
architecture of DAQ is discussed, and two candidate internetworking technologies (high speed Ethernet and InfniBand) are compared in different aspects for
DAQ. Three schemes based on 10 Gigabit Ethernet are presented and studied.
Chapter 6 is a general summary of the thesis