ATCA-based computation platform for data acquisition and triggering in particle physics experiments

An ATCA-based computation platform for data acquisition and trigger applications in nuclear and particle physics experiments has been developed. Each compute node (CN) which appears as a field replaceable unit (FRU) in an ATCA shelf, features 5 Xilinx Virtex-4 FX60 FPGAs and up to 10 GBytes DDR2 memory. Connectivity is provided with 8 optical links and 5 Gigabit Ethernet ports, which are mounted on each board to receive data from detectors and forward results to outer shelves or PC farms with attached mass storage. Fast point-to-point on-board interconnections between FPGAs as well as the full-mesh shelf backplane provide flexibility and high bandwidth to partition algorithms and correlate results among them. The system represents a highly reconfigurable and scalable solution for multiple applications.