CERN Accelerating science

The central detectors of the ALICE experiment at LHC will produce a data size of up to 75 MByte/event at an event rate <200 Hz resulting in a data rate of \~15 GByte/sec. This exceeds the foreseen mass storage bandwidth of 1.25 GByte/sec by one order of magnitude. Online processing of the data is necessary in order to select interesting (sub)events ("High Level Trigger"), or to compress data efficiently by modeling techniques. The largest computing challenge is imposed by the TPC, requiring realtime pattern recognition. The work carried out investigates the performance of various pattern recognition schemes applicable for online track reconstruction within the ALICE HLT system. Furthermore, as an application for reducing the data rate, very efficient TPC data compression algorithms based on track and cluster modeling have been evaluated.