High rate packets transmission on ethernet LAN using commodity hardware

We report on measurements performed to test the reliability of high rate data transmission over copper Gigabit Ethernet for the LHCb online system. High reliability of such transmissions will be crucial for the functioning of the software trigger layers of the LHCb experiment, at the CERN's LHC accelerator. The technological challenge in the system implementation consists of handling the expected high data throughput of event fragments using, to a large extent, commodity equipment. We report on performance evaluations (throughput, error rates and frame drop) of the main components involved in data transmission: the Ethernet cable, the PCI bus and the operating system (the latest kernel versions of Linux). Three different platforms have been used.