Enhancement of White Rabbit technology

Javier Diaz (UGR, Spain) - ASTERICS Work Package 5

Research infrastructures like SKA and CTA will generate large amounts of data. White Rabbit (WR) technology needs to be adapted to enhance data bandwidth to deal with these large data amounts. This was done at the University of Granada by using a novel SoC solution for time transfer and frequency dissemination, adding direct memory access (DMA) support on the platform. In practice, this feature translates to WR Ethernet networks capable of providing timing and more than 500Mb/s data throughput on the same link in a reliable way. Furthermore, on-going work in collaboration of different industrial partners is the development of a new WR version for 10Gbps links to extend the existing synchronization capabilities of 1Gbps links to more advanced and higher bandwidth interfaces.

In addition, new network protocols for redundant topologies without single point of failure were created in collaboration with Seven Solutions. This allows to combine accurate timing distribution with switchover mechanisms that allow to maintain time transfer accuracy in case of failure of one of the network grandmaster devices. All these features allow to distribute subnanosecond timing for scientific facilities with better performance and reliability, improving the system availability and resiliency to failures.