A high speed DAQ framework for future hig level triger and event building clusters
Modern data acquisition and trigger systems require a throughput of several GB/s and latencies of the order of microseconds. To satisfy such requirements, a heterogeneous readout system based on FPGA readout cards and GPU based computing nodes coupled by InfiniBand has been developed. The incoming data from the back end electronics is delivered directly into the internal memory of GPUs through a dedicated peer to peer PCIe communication. High performance DMA engines have been developed for direct communication between FPGAs and GPUs using "DirectGMA (AMD)" and "GPUDirect (NVIDIA)" technologies. The proposed infrastructure is a candidate for future generations of event building clusters, high level trigger filter farms and low level trigger system. In this paper the heterogeneous FPGA GPU architecture will be presented and its performance be discussed.