Data taking network for COMET Phase-I

TL;DR

This paper describes the design and evaluation of a cost-effective data taking network for the COMET Phase-I experiment, achieving high throughput with a simple network structure.

Contribution

It introduces a two-network system using common optical components, reducing costs while maintaining high data transfer performance.

Findings

Event building throughput of 337 MiB/s for front-end network

Event building throughput of 1.2 GiB/s for back-end network

Cost-effective network design without performance loss

Abstract

An experiment to search for mu-e conversion named COMET is being constructed at J-PARC. The experiment will be carried out using a two-stage approach of Phase-I and Phase-II. The data taking system of Phase-I is developed based on common network technology. The data taking system consists of two kinds of networks. One is a front-end network. Its network bundles around twenty front-end devices that have a 1-Gb optical network port. And a front-end computer accepts data from the devices via its network. The other is a back-end network that collects all event fragments from the front-end computers using a 10-Gb network. We used a low price 1Gb/10Gb optical network switch for the front-end network. And direct connection between the front-end PC and an event building PC using 10-Gb optical network devices was used for the back-end network. The event building PC has ten 10-Gb network ports. And each network port of the event building PC is connected to the front-end PC's port without using a network switch. We evaluated data taking performance with an event building on these two kinds of networks. The event building throughput of the front-end network achieved 337 MiB/s. And the event building throughput of the back-end networks achieved 1.2 GiB/s. It means that we could reduce the construction cost of the data taking network using this structure without deteriorating performance. Moreover, we evaluated the writing speed of the local storage RAID disk system connected to a back-end PC by a SAS interface, and a long-distance network copy from the experiment location to the lasting storage.