Scalable parallel open architecture data acquisition system for low to high rate experiments, test beams and all SSC (Superconducting Super Collider) detectors.

摘要

A new era of high-energy physics research is beginning requiring accelerators with much higher luminosities and interaction rates in order to discover new elementary particles. As a consequences, both orders of magnitude higher data rates from the detector and online processing power, well beyond the capabilities of current high energy physics data acquisition systems, are required. This paper describes a new data acquisition system architecture which draws heavily from the communications industry, is totally parallel (i.e., without any bottlenecks), is capable of data rates of hundreds of GigaBytes per second from the detector and into an array of online processors (i.e., processor farm), and uses an open systems architecture to guarantee compatibility with future commercially available online processor farms. The main features of the system architecture are standard interface ICs to detector subsystems wherever possible, fiber optic digital data transmission from the near-detector electronics, a self-routing parallel event builder, and the use of industry-supported and high-level language programmable processors in the proposed BCD system for both triggers and online filters. A brief status report of an ongoing project at Fermilab to build the self-routing parallel event builder will also be given in the paper. 3 figs., 1 tab.