(1) University of Glasgow, Kelvin Building, Glasgow G12 8QQ, Scotland.
The LHCb experiment is dedicated to studying CP violation and rare decay phenomena. In order to achieve these physics goals precise tracking and vertexing around the interaction point is crucial. This is provided by the VELO (VErtex LOcator) silicon detector. After digitization, FPGAs are employed to run several algorithms to suppress noise and reconstruct clusters. This is performed by an FPGA based processing board. An off-line software project, VETRA, has been developed which performs a bit perfect emulation of this complex processing in the FPGAs. This is a n ovel development as this hardware emulation is not standalone but rather is fully integrated into the LHCb software to allow the reconstruction of full data from the detector. This software platform facilitates the development and understanding of the behaviour of the processing algorithms, the optimization of the parameters of the algorithms that will be loaded into the FPGA and monitoring of the detector performance. This framework has also been adopted by the Silicon Tracker detector of LHCb. This processing framework was successfully used with the first 1500 tracks of data in the VELO obtained from the first LHC beam in September 2008. The software architecture and utilisation of the VETRA project will be discussed in detail.
17th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics
21 - 27 March 2009, Prague, Czech Republic.