FPGA-Based Particle Recognition in the HADES Experiment

Modern FPGA technologies are often employed in nuclear and particle physics experimental facilities to accelerate application-specific computation. The authors present the particle recognition computation for the HADES experiment in this paper. The algorithms of particle track reconstruction and Cherenkov ring recognition are introduced in the context of concrete particle detectors. Implementation results of the hardware processing engines reveal the feasibility to realize the pattern recognition computation on the FPGA. Performance estimation indicates that the FPGA cluster in one ATCA shelf can achieve an equivalent computation capability to thousands of commodity PCs for the HADES experiment.