ATCA¹ For Physics
Workshop and Special Session on ATCA at Dresden NSS
OCTOBER 18TH AND 19TH, 2008

The 2nd ATCA for Physics Workshop will be held October 18-19, 2008 in conjunction with the NSS-MIC Conference. The new ATCA/µTCA open industry standard platform is gaining traction in the physics community because of its advanced communication bus architecture (serial gigabit replacing parallel buses), high availability n+1 redundancy, variety of form factors and very high data throughput options. The range of product offerings is proving useful to both controls and high throughput detector applications with active programs showing up most notably at DESY for XFEL, but also at other laboratories such as IHEP, KEK, SLAC, FNAL, ANL, BNL, and CERN. Both the CMS and ATLAS detectors are investigating ATCA/µTCA solutions for future upgrades. Industry is also showing strong innovation especially in µTCA to produce low cost integrated platforms that can be turn-key for entry level users as well as easily expanded into systems of arbitrarily large size.
The goals of the workshop are to present tutorials by industry standards experts; formal contributed papers on lab developments; and instructional live demos of hardware and software by invited industry participants over two days. Finally the meeting will conclude with an open discussion session to explore how to set up a more formal “ATCA for Physics” collaboration between laboratories and industry to achieve broad sharing of information and interchangeability of module designs. This involves making choices on bus protocols, connectors, cabling and cable entry systems, as well as collecting information on available specialized modules of interest to physics outside the common processing-intensive maximum throughput telecom offerings.

Special Session
In addition to the workshop, a Special Session on ATCA on Thursday October 23, 4-7 PM, will feature a half dozen invited papers on significant developments in data acquisition at different laboratories. One of the papers will be a tutorial on Shelf Management software by an industry representative and another will be a Rapporteur summary talk on the preceding 2-day workshop. Finally, a number of manufacturers are being encouraged to exhibit new ATCA/ µTCA products at the main conference.

For additional information contact Ray Larsen, SLAC, at larsen@slac.stanford.edu; Phone: +1 650 926 4907. Organizing Committee: Co-chairs: P. LeDû, Saclay; R. Larsen, SLAC; M. Votava, FNAL; Members: R. Downing, SLAC; R. Engels, Forschungszentrum Jülich; K. Furukawa, KEK; T. Jezynski, DESY; Z. Liu, IHEP; V. Pavlicek, FNAL; C. Saunders, ANL.

¹ Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture, an open standard of the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturing Group (PICMG).