A converged architecture for processing 32 Tbps of physics data in real-time at the LHCb experiment

Abstract

The LHCb detector at the Large Hadron Collider has been upgraded to acquire an unprecedented 32 Tbps of particle-collision data to provide new insights in the High Energy Physics domain. The data produced by the detector is filtered in real-time to select interesting collisions. As part of the upgrade, a pre-filtering stage has been removed leading to a factor 40 increase in data rate. To deal with the high throughput demands of LHCb real-time data processing, we present an off-the-shelf network architecture using zero-copy techniques in conjunction with an efficient, fully-GPU-based filter. Our converged architecture is able to process the full 32 Tbps of particle-collision data in real-time, the highest in any physics experiment to date. Our result extends the reach of the LHCb physics programme and sets a new standard for real-time data processing at particle physics experiments.