Niko Neufeld is a member of the ‘online system’ team at the LHCb experiment. He recently gave a talk in the CERN IT Department about an exciting project with CERN openlab partner company Intel. The High Throughput Computing Collaboration (HTCC) investigates the use of Intel technologies in trigger and data acquisition (TDAQ) systems.

As with the other experiments on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the collision events registered by the detector produce more data than can reasonably be stored. Thus, in order to select the events that are of most interest to physicists, an electronic ‘trigger’ system is used to filter out all but about 0.1% of the data.

The HTCC is studying the extent to which custom-made real-time triggers can be complemented by off-the-shelf Intel technology. In particular, the use of Intel OmniPath for high-bandwidth data acquisition is being investigated, as is the use of Intel Xeon Phi technology and the Intel Xeon FPGA concept for accelerating complex, CPU-intensive algorithms.

To find out more, you can watch the full video of Niko’s talk here.