LHCb will operate the largest data acquisition network built today for any scientific instrument using state-of-the-art fast networks. The supercomputer that is currently constructed at the LHCb will allegedly be the largest real-time data acquisition system in the World in 2021. In order to ascertain its real-time operation (thus avoiding losing critical physics data), some meticulous design of the network has to be made. The system has to optimally utilize the Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) cluster technology with such fabrics as InfiniBand or RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE v2). This development process of this real-time network requires some additional utility tools to monitor and visualize the designs of networks. The purpose of this project is to develop a utility GUI application to “visualize” this high-speed network. This is a notable difference from existing network monitoring tools that are targeting more classical IP over Ethernet. This is to have some additional mechanisms to debug, design, and modify the LHCb data acquisition network.
Starting from an existing application in Python, the program will be fed with network and routing data from the hardware. In the GUI one must be able to clearly visualize:
Interested students please contact Rafal (see contact below) to ask questions and for an evaluation task.