Illinois Institute of Technology researchers are working with scientists at Fermilab to develop software that could improve the way data is processed in high-energy physics experiments. The project, supported by a Universities Research Association Visiting Scholars Program grant, focuses on creating a programmable network prototype for the DUNE neutrino project.
Nik Sultana, assistant professor of computer science at Illinois Tech, received the grant and collaborated with Fermilab researchers to write “Complex Parsing for In-Network Acceleration of High-Energy Physics Experiments.” The work addresses how switches in DUNE’s detectors can read and process data packets in real time, rather than storing them for later analysis.
“This work is situated in an exciting problem space for finding creative solutions to the data networking problems of cutting-edge physics experiments,” Sultana said. “This space accommodates researchers with different expertise, ranging across physics, computing, and networking. It is particularly welcoming to students since the experts don’t have all the answers. We all work as students to navigate this problem space while learning new things along the way.”
DUNE’s detectors generate large amounts of data in unique formats. By programming network equipment within DUNE’s infrastructure, researchers aim for smarter and faster data handling.
“Ideas developed in this research can be adapted for other environments that involve transferring large quantities of latency-sensitive data streams,” Sultana said. “In the Chicago area, the fields that come to mind are electronic finance, online games, and supporting ongoing research on processing [artificial intelligence] workloads and on managing quantum computing workloads.”
The team used FABRIC—a 29-site international testbed—for their research. This platform connects commercial sites, national labs, and campuses through high-speed optical links and offers extensive compute and storage resources suitable for testing networking technologies at scale.
“FABRIC served as a sort of virtual laboratory as we used it to prototype, test, and evaluate the research,” Sultana said. “In addition to hardware resources, FABRIC provides a flexible interface for testing our prototype and to evaluate it at realistic data rates. For our experiments on FABRIC, we were able to use actual detector data that was captured at Fermilab, which increased the fidelity of our research.”
Challenges included handling mixed-format data on switches not originally designed for such tasks and reading large packets quickly using switch features outside their intended purpose.
“This research is interdisciplinary, and it therefore requires us to learn things from outside our day-to-day research areas,” Sultana said. “This pushes you outside your comfort zone, and it can feel challenging, but it can also open paths through which research can have impact. In the case of this project, the Illinois Tech team learned a lot about how particle detectors work, how they produce data, and how that data is made available for analysis.”
The current prototype may lead to future developments such as custom hardware design or changes in how experimental physics projects format their collected data.