High Speed DAQ with DPDK

Project Specification

The experiments at CERN generate mountainous amounts of data. In the first run of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) [1], 30 petabytes of data was produced annually, and up to 40 Terabits per second amount of data more is expected to be produced during the future run of LHC in 2020. To filter the data coming from the LHCb [2] detector, LHCb team is working on a benchmark application called DAQPIPE [3] which emulates the data coming from the detector in a local area network. One of the major challenges faced by DAQPIPE is to prevent any type of data loss by implementing high-speed networks which can bear the load of the data coming in. The aim of the project is to implement a DPDK [4] driver for DAQPIPE to create a high speed packet processing, transfer and communication mechanism for future LHCb upgrades.

Abstract

DPDK is a new frame-work for very fast software defined networking. It allows multi-stage Ethernet networks for DAQ to be implemented with very cost-effective hardware by offloading all intelligence and most of the buffering into commodity servers. The LHCb data acquisition for Run3 will need a 40 Terabit/s network, where 100 Gigabit Ethernet is one of the interesting candidates. In this project we aim to port the existing DAQ exerciser software of LHCb, DAQPIPE, to DPDK and perform tests on state of the art network hardware.