Cooling and Timing Tests of the ATLAS Fast TracKer VME Boards

Journal Article · Fri Jul 02 00:00:00 EDT 2021 · IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/tns.2021.3089048· OSTI ID:1822322

Sottocornola, S. ^[1]; Annovi, A. ^[2]; Biesuz, N. V. ^[2]; Brost, E. ^[3]; Calvetti, M. ^[2]; Gentsos, C. ^[4]; Holmes, T. ^[5]; Horyn, L. ^[5]; Iizawa, T. ^[6]; Lanza, A. ^[1]; Long, J. D. ^[7]; Mastrandrea, P. ^[2]; Maznas, I. ^[8]; Negri, A. ^[1]; Calabro, D. ^[1]; Piendibene, M. ^[2]; Roda, C. ^[2]; Romano, E. ^[1]; Seiss, T. ^[5]

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1. Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), Pavia (Italy)
2. Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), Pavia (Italy); Univ. of Pisa (Italy)
3. Brookhaven National Lab. (BNL), Upton, NY (United States)
4. European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Meyrin (Switzerland)
5. Univ. of Chicago, IL (United States). Enrico Fermi Inst.
6. Univ. of Geneva (Switzerland)
7. Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL (United States)
8. Aristotle Univ. of Thessaloniki (Greece)

The Fast TracKer (FTK) is an ATLAS trigger upgrade built for full-event, low-latency, high-rate tracking. The FTK core, made of 9U VME boards, performs the most demanding computational task. The associative memory board (AMB) serial link processor and the auxiliary card (AUX), plugged on the front and back sides of the same VME slot, constitute the processing unit (PU), which finds tracks using hits from eight layers of the inner detector. The PU works in pipeline with the second stage board (SSB), which finds 12-layer tracks by adding extra hits to the identified tracks. In the designed configuration, 16 PUs and four SSBs are installed in a VME crate. The high power consumption of the AMB, AUX, and SSB (respectively, of about 250, 70, and 160 W per board) required the development of a custom cooling system. Even though the expected power consumption for each VME crate of the FTK system is high compared with a common VME setup, the 8 FTK core crates will use ≈60 kW, which is just a fraction of the power and the space needed for a CPU farm performing the same task. We report on the integration of 32 PUs and eight SSBs inside the FTK system, on the infrastructures needed to run and cool them, and on the tests performed to verify the system processing rate and the temperature stability at a safe value.

• Research Organization: Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), Upton, NY (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC), High Energy Physics (HEP)
• Grant/Contract Number: SC0012704
• OSTI ID: 1822322
• Report Number(s): BNL--222171-2021-JAAM
• Journal Information: IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science, Journal Name: IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science Journal Issue: 8 Vol. 68; ISSN 0018-9499
• Publisher: IEEE
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS
Amplitude modulation
Associative memories (AM)
Clocks
Field programmable gate arrays
Power demand
Power measurement
Roads
Semiconductor device measurement
electronics cooling
field-programmable gate array (FPGA)
particle tracking
temperature control
timing