Online data processing using hardware accelerators for nuclear physics experiments

One of the recent trends of the data acquisition systems used in high-energy physics experiments and nuclear physics experiments is to employ the free-streaming data acquisition system in order to run the experiments under higher beam intensities and collision rates. As a result, to cope with the increased data rate, tremendous amounts of data sent from detectors needs to be processed online faster and more efficiently to achieve the required compression factors to fit the data in the capacity for the permanent storage. Even though the data taking strategies and operation conditions are different between experiments, there are several common trends such as more extensive online computing and the adoption of hardware accelerators such as FPGA and GPGPUs to efficiently process the data online.

This presentation gives an overview of online data processing using hardware accelerators in some of the LHC experiments (ALICE and LHCb) and further developments done in Japan for the future nuclear physics experiments.