An Embedded Real-Time System on ATLAS ROBIN

ATLAS is the largest particle detector at the Large Hadron Collider for high energy physics experiments that produces over 40 TB/s event data. The ATLAS Readout Buffer INput(ROBIN) subsystem is an essential device to buffer and reduce the data, which has a IBM PowerPC core for the control functionalities. This dissertation addresses the software design of an embedded real-time system centering on the PowerPC micro-controller, as the management core of the ROBIN. A page-based solution is presented to handle the event buffer management, and a hash searching scheme is applied to deal with the event lookup. An embedded real-time Linux operating system is adapted and optimized for the ROBIN PowerPC processor. The experiment results show that the standalone non-OS based PowerPC system is already above the current ATLAS requirements, while the real-time Linux based ROBIN PowerPC system does not meet the related ROBIN baseline performance requirement