paper

Architecture of the data aggregation and streaming system for the European Spallation Source neutron instrument suite

arXiv:1807.10388 · doi:10.1088/1748-0221/13/10/T10001

Abstract

The European Spallation Source (ESS) will provide long neutron pulses for experiments on a suite of different instruments. Most of these will perform neutron data acquisition in event mode, i.e. each detected neutron will be characterised by one absolute timestamp and pixel identifier pair. Slow controls metadata from EPICS, such as sample environment measurements and motor positions, will also be timestamped at their source, so that all data and metadata are streamed as a list of events instead of histograms. A flexible data aggregation and streaming system is being developed combining both open source third-party software and in-house development. This is to be used at ESS and other neutron scattering facilities like ISIS and SINQ, replacing legacy solutions by a shared software collection maintained by a cross-facility effort. The architecture of the Apache Kafka-based system, its metadata forwarding and NeXus file writing components are presented, along with test results demonstrating their integration and the scalability in terms of performance.

Corrected typos; addressed revision requests: added more details about event sizes, added discussion on generic versus specific applications, added information about the Event Formation Unit's event schema, added more information on performance tests and added reference

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