A High-End Reconfigurable Computation Platform for Nuclear and Particle Physics Experiments

A high-performance computation platform based on field-programmable gate arrays targets nuclear and particle physics experiment applications. The system can be constructed or scaled into a supercomputer-equivalent size for detector data processing by inserting compute nodes into advanced telecommunications computing architecture (ATCA) crates. Among the case study results are that one ATCA crate can provide a computation capability equivalent to hundreds of commodity PCs for Hades online particle track reconstruction and Cherenkov ring recognition.