RDMA-accelerated data transport in ALFA

Abstract

ALFA is a modern software platform for simulation, reconstruction and analysis of particle physics experiments. The FairMQ library in ALFA provides building blocks for distributed processing pipelines in anticipation of high data rates in next-generation, trigger-less FAIR and LHC RUN3 ALICE experiments. Modern data transport technologies are integrated through FairMQ by implementing an abstract message queuing based transport interface. Current implementations are based on ZeroMQ, nanomsg and shared memory and can be selected at run-time. In order to achieve highest inter-node data throughput on high bandwidth network fabrics (e.g. Infiniband), we propose a new FairMQ transport implementation based on the libfabric technology.