Accelerating Track Reconstruction and Event Filtering in ATLAS TDAQ using Heterogeneous Compute Architecture

Computer Science at the University of Huddersfield are a Technical Associate Institute of the ATLAS project at CERN. ATLAS is the largest experiment at CERN and is most well-known for the role it played in the discovery of the Higgs Boson. As a part of the High Luminosity upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) the ATLAS detector is also being upgraded which will require the processing of very high raw data rates (>5 TB/s) in order to identify events that could contain interesting physics that will then be stored for offline detailed analysis. 

We are offering a funded PhD studentship to work in the area of compute accelerator for the event filtering and track reconstruction of the ATLAS TDAQ (Trigger & Data AcQuisition) system. Track reconstruction consists of a chain of data and compute intensive stages including space point formation, clusterisation and track fitting. This project aims to develop novel compute architecture using heterogeneous processors to increase the throughput of the tracking chain. Additionally, there are also opportunities to address the challenges from a combination of algorithms and hardware acceleration models.

This project will involve close collaboration with, and visits to, our ATLAS partners located at prestigious, globally distributed universities and research facilities, and there will be opportunities to spend time at CERN in Geneva.

3 years full-time plus an optional 12-month writing up (please note that no funding is available for the writing up period)