R. Mommsen

Commissioning of the CMS High Level Trigger

The CMS experiment will collect data from the proton-proton collisions delivered by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at a centre-of-mass energy up to 14 TeV. The CMS trigger system is designed to cope with unprecedented luminosities and LHC bunch-crossing rates up to 40 MHz. The unique CMS trigger architecture only employs two trigger levels. The Level-1 trigger is implemented using custom electronics, while the High Level Trigger (HLT) is based on software algorithms running on a large cluster of commercial processors, the Event Filter Farm. We present the major functionalities of the CMS High Level Trigger system as of the starting of LHC beams operations in September 2008. The validation of the HLT system in the online environment with Monte Carlo simulated data and its commissioning during cosmic rays data taking campaigns are discussed in detail. We conclude with the description of the HLT operations with the first circulating LHC beams before the incident occurred the 19th September 2008.

10 Gbps TCP/IP streams from the FPGA for the CMS DAQ eventbuilder network

For the upgrade of the DAQ of the CMS experiment in 2013/2014 an interface between the custom detector Front End Drivers (FEDs) and the new DAQ eventbuilder network has to be designed. For a loss-less data collection from more then 600 FEDs a new FPGA based card implementing the TCP/IP protocol suite over 10Gbps Ethernet has been developed. We present the hardware challenges and protocol modifications made to TCP in order to simplify its FPGA implementation together with a set of performance measurements which were carried out with the current prototype.