Real-Time Data Compression for Data Acquisition Systems Applied to the ITER Radial Neutron Camera

To achieve the aim of the international thermonuclear experimental reactor (ITER) radial neutron camera diagnostic, the data acquisition prototype must be compliant with a sustained 2-MHz peak event per each channel. The data are acquired and processed using an IPFN FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC-AD2-1600) with two digitizer channels of 12-bit resolution and a sampling rate up to 1.6 GSamples/s mounted in an peripheral component interconnect express (PCIe) evaluation board from Xilinx (KC705) installed in the host PC. The acquired data in the event-based data path are streamed to the host through the PCIe <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\times 8$ </tex-math></inline-formula> direct memory access with a maximum data throughput per channel <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\approx 0.5$ </tex-math></inline-formula> GB/s of raw data (event base), <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\approx 1$ </tex-math></inline-formula> GB/s per digitizer, and up to 1.6 GB/s in continuous mode. The prototype architecture comprises a host PC with two KC705 modules and four channels, producing up to 2 GB/s in event mode and up to 3.2 GB/s in continuous mode. To reduce the produced data throughput from host to ITER archiving system, the real-time data compression was evaluated using the LZ4 lossless compression algorithm, which provides compression speed up to 400 MB/s per core. This paper presents the architecture, implementation, and test of the parallel real-time data compression system running in multiple isolated cores. The average space saving and the performance results for long-term acquisitions up to 30 min, using different data block sizes and different number of CPUs, are also presented.