Ricardo Graciani

DIRAC pilot framework and the DIRAC Workload Management System

DIRAC, the LHCb community Grid solution, has pioneered the use of pilot jobs in the Grid. Pilot Jobs provide a homogeneous interface to an heterogeneous set of computing resources. At the same time, Pilot Jobs allow to delay the scheduling decision to the last moment, thus taking into account the precise running conditions at the resource and last moment requests to the system. The DIRAC Workload Management System provides one single scheduling mechanism for jobs with very different profiles. To achieve an overall optimisation, it organizes pending jobs in task queues, both for individual users and production activities. Task queues are created with jobs having similar requirements. Following the VO policy a priority is assigned to each task queue. Pilot submission and subsequent job matching are based on these priorities following a statistical approach.

FlexToT - Current mode ASIC for readout of common cathode SiPM arrays

A front end application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) for the readout of common cathode Silicon Photo-Multipliers arrays is presented with the following features: wide dynamic range, high speed, multi channel, low input impedance current amplifier, low power (≈10mW per channel), common cathode connection, directly coupled input with common mode voltage control and separated timing and charge signal output.A 16 channel prototype with 16 independent outputs for energy and pile-up detection and a single fast timing output is described. The low jitter current mode processing together with a configurable differential current mode logic (CML) output provides a timing signal suitable for Time of Flight (TOF) applications, such as TOF-PET (Positron Emission Tomography). Each channel delivers a digital output of a Time Over Threshold (TOT) type with a pulse width proportional to peak current (charge) input. The current mode input stage features a novel double feedback; a low speed feedback loop keeps input node voltage constant while a higher speed feedback loop keeps input impedance low. Dedicated circuitry allows SiPM high over-voltage operation, thus maximizing Photon Detection Efficiency (PDE) and timing resolution. Design was submitted in June 2012 in Austria Microsystems (AMS) 0.35 μm HBT BiCMOS technology and is under test.

Study of multianode photomultipliers for the electromagnetic calorimeter preshower read out of the lhcb experiment

Abstract The L hc b experiment will study the CP symmetry violation in the system of the beauty particles. The detector is a 20-m-long spectrometer, to be installed on the proton–proton collider L hc . Of major importance for the level 0 trigger is the preshower of the electromagnetic calorimeter designed to discriminate between electrons, hadrons and photons. The preshower cells consist of a two-radiation-length lead sheet located between two plastic scintillator planes. The scintillation light is extracted with wavelength-shifting fibres. The best candidates to read out the light of the 6000 detector cells are multianode photomultipliers. The HAMAMATSU photomultiplier R5900-00-M64 has been studied and its responses in terms of gain, linearity, uniformity within and between the anodes and cross-talk between the channels are addressed in this document.

Kali: The framework for fine calibration of the LHCb Electromagnetic Calorimeter

The precise calibration (at a level of below 1%) of the electromagnetic calorimeter (ECAL) of the LHCb experiment is an essential task for the fulfilment of the LHCb physics program. The final step of this task is performed with two calibration methods using the real data from the experimental setup. It is a very CPU-consuming procedure as both methods require processing of (108) events which must be selected, reconstructed and analyzed. In this document we present the Kali framework developed within the LHCb software framework, which implements these two final calibration methods. It is integrated with Grid middleware and makes use of parallelism tools, such as python parallel processing modules, to provide an efficient way, both time and disk wise, for the final ECAL calibration. The results of the fine calibration with the very first data collected by the LHCb experiment will also be presented. With the use of the Kali framework it took only two days of processing and allowed to achieve a calibration accuracy of 2-2.5% for the different ECAL areas.

Developing LHCb Grid software: experiences and advances

The LHCb Grid software has been used for two Physics Data Challenges, with the latter producing over 98 TB of data and consuming over 650 processor‐years of computing power. This paper discusses the experience of developing a Grid infrastructure, interfacing to an existing Grid (LCG) and traditional computing centres simultaneously, running LHCb experiment software and jobs on the Grid, and the integration of a number of new technologies into the Grid infrastructure. Our experience and utilization of the following core technologies will be discussed: OGSI, XML‐RPC, Grid services, LCG middleware and instant messaging. Specific attention will be given to analysing the behaviour of over 100 000 jobs executed through the LCG Grid environment, providing insight into the performance, failure modes and scheduling efficiency over a period of several months for a large computational Grid incorporating over 40 sites and thousands of nodes.

MUSIC: An 8 channel readout ASIC for SiPM arrays

This paper presents an 8 channel ASIC for SiPM anode readout based on a novel low input impedance current conveyor (under patent1). This Multiple Use SiPM Integrated Circuit (MUSIC) has been designed to serve several purposes, including, for instance, the readout of SiPM arrays for some of the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) cameras. The current division scheme at the very front end part of the circuit splits the input current into differently scaled copies which are connected to independent current mirrors. The circuit contains a tunable pole zero cancellation of the SiPM recovery time constant to deal with sensors from different manufacturers. Decay times up to 100 ns are supported covering most of the available SiPM devices in the market. MUSIC offers three main features: (1) differential output of the sum of the individual input channels; (2) 8 individual single ended analog outputs and; (3) 8 individual binary outputs. The digital outputs encode the amount of collected charge in the duration of the digital signal using a time over threshold technique. For each individual channel, the user must select the analog or digital output. Each functionality, the signal sum and the 8 A/D outputs, include a selectable dual-gain configuration. Moreover, the signal sum implements dual-gain output providing a 15 bit dynamic range. Full die simulation results of the MUSIC designed using AMS 0.35 µm SiGe technology are presented: total die size of 9 mm2, 500 MHz bandwidth for channel sum and 150 MHz bandwidth for A/D channels, low input impedance (≈32 Ω), single photon output pulse width at half maximum (FWHM) between 5 and 10 ns and with a power consumption of ≈ 30 mW/ch plus ≈ 200 mW for the 8 ch sum. Encapsulated prototype samples of the MUSIC are expected by March 2016.

Performance of the FlexToT v2 ASIC on the readout of different detector designs for PET

A new version of the FlexToT application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) has been designed and fabricated with an extended dynamic range and improved channel uniformity suitable for readout of different detector block designs in time of flight (TOF) positron emission tomography (PET) applications. The performance of the FlexToT v2 ASIC has been evaluated using segmented, monolithic and phoswich scintillator elements and matrices coupled to silicon photmultiplier (SiPM) arrays. The enhanced dynamic range of FlexToT v2 compared to its previous version allows the correct identification of individual crystals in scintillator matrices, both single layer and phoswich. Operation with monolithic scintillators was also demonstrated, with energy resolutions of 18% (FWHM) at 511 keV and reconstructed PET images of point sources yielding spatial resolutions on the order of 2 mm (FWHM). The results show that the FlexToT v2 ASIC is a flexible solution for the front-end readout of different designs of SiPM-based scintillator detectors in TOF-PET applications.

The LHCb Experience on the Grid from the DIRAC Accounting Data

DIRAC is the software framework developed by LHCb to manage all its computing operations on the Grid. Since 2003 it has been used for large scale Monte Carlo simulation productions and for user analysis of these data. Since the end of 2009, with the start-up of LHC, DIRAC also takes care of the distribution, reconstruction, selection and analysis of the physics data taken by the detector apparatus. During 2009, DIRAC executed almost 5 million jobs for LHCb. In order to execute this workload slightly over 6 million of pilot jobs were submitted, out of which approximately one third were aborted by the Grid infrastructure. In 2010, thanks to their improved efficiency, DIRAC pilots are able, on average, to match and execute between 2 and 3 LHCb jobs during their lifetime, largely reducing the load on the Grid infrastructure. Given the large amount of submitted jobs and used resources, it becomes essential to store detailed information about their execution to track the behaviour of the system. The DIRAC Accounting system takes care, among other things, to collect and store data concerning the execution of jobs and pilots, making it available to everyone via the public interface of the LHCb DIRAC web portal in the form of time-binned accumulated distributions. The analysis of the raw accounting data stored allow us to improve and debug the system performance, as well as, to give a detailed picture on how LHCb uses its Grid resources. A new tool has been developed to extract the raw records from the DIRAC Accounting database and to transform them into ROOT files for subsequent study. This contribution presents an analysis of such data both for LHCb jobs and the corresponding pilots, including resource usage, number of pilots per job, job efficiency and other relevant variables that will help to further improving the LHCb Grid experience.

Heavy Ion Test Results in a CMOS triple Voting Register for a High-Energy Physics Experiment

A heavy ion radiation test has been performed to evaluate the SEU sensitivity on a mixed-mode ASIC. We present the results obtained when the Triple Voting Registers used in the digital block of the ASIC are irradiated with heavy ions.