High-level trigger computing equipment for the Belle II experiment

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The Belle II experiment will address fundamental questions about the nature of matter: What happened after the Big Bang to rid the universe of anti-matter? What particle or particles make up the Dark Matter that pervades the universe, and how do they interact with normal matter? This experiment is a successor to the Belle and BaBar experiments, whose studies of e+e- collisions in this same energy region was mentioned in the official citation for the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics. Belle II will be located at the SuperKEKB e+e- collider at the KEK laboratory in Tsukuba, Japan, and is designed to increase the existing world data sample in this energy region by a factor of 30 or more. The discovery potential of Belle II is complementary to that of the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The experimental environment at Belle II is much cleaner, allowing studies of rare processes that would be swamped by background at the LHC, and providing sensitivity to new physical interactions and particles, at mass scales that can exceed the reach of the LHC, through their presence in quantum loops. The requested funds are for equipment to be used as part of the high-level trigger (HLT) for Belle II. The HLT receives data in real time from the Belle II detector, analyzes it rapidly, and determines which e+e- collisions to save to permanent offline storage. This infrastructure is needed to process the first e+e- collisions from SuperKEKB, which will begin in 2017. The data rate is expected to continue to rise sharply through 2018, which will require additional processing capacity at the HLT. This represents a significant Canadian contribution to Belle II. Canadian researchers will benefit from access to the full Belle II data set, and will be involved in the design and implementation of the HLT itself. This research will further the worldwide knowledge of the fundamental constituents of matter and of how the present-day universe came to be. The Canadian researchers and students who work on the HLT system will acquire expertise in data acquisition and real-time computing systems, high-bandwidth data filtering, robust algorithm development, data quality monitoring and high-throughput computing, skills that are in demand in the burgeoning “Big Data” industry. The associated knowledge transfer will bring economic benefits to the private and public sector.