FRBL04
MAX IV Laboratory, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
NBI, København, Denmark
Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany
Azimuthal integration (AZINT) is a procedure for reducing 2D-detector image into a 1D-histogram. AZINT is used extensively in photon science experiments, in particular in small angle scattering and powder diffraction. It improves signal to noise ratio and data volumes are reduced by a factor of 1000. The underlaying procedure i.e. bin-counting has other applications. The potential of FPGAs for data analysis originates from recent progress in FPGA software design with complexity matching the scientific requirements. We implemented AZINT on FPGAs using OpenCL and synchronous message exchange (SME). It is demonstrated AZINT can process 600 Gb/s streams, i.e. about 20’40 Gpixels/s, on a single FPGA. FPGAs are usually more energy-efficient than GPUs, they are flexible so they can fit a specific problem and outperform GPUs in relevant applications, in particular AZINT here. Beside high throughput FPGAs allow data processing with well-defined and low latencies for real-time experiments. Radiation tolerance of FPGAs brings more synergies. It makes them ideal components for extra-terrestrial scientific instruments (e.g. Mars rovers) or detectors at spaceflights and satellites.
