Pattern Recognition and Reconstruction on an FPGA Coprocessor Board

High energy accelerator labs use huge detector systems to track particles. The ATLAS detector at CERN, Geneva, will provide complex three-dimensional images. A trigger system at the detector output is used to reduce the amount of data to a manageable size. Each trigger applies certain filter algorithms to select the very rare physically interesting events. The algorithm presented here processes data from a special detector, called TRT, to generate a trigger decision within ≈10ms. System supervisors then decide together with other results whether the event will be rejected or passed to the next trigger level. Due to the restricted execution time for calculating the decision, fast pattern recognition algorithms are required. These algorithms require a high I/O bandwidth and high computing power. These reasons and the high degree of parallelism make it best suited for custom computing machines.