The E791 Parallel Architecture Data Acquisition System

Abstract

To collect data for the study of charm particle decays, we built a high speed data acquisition system for use with the E791 magnetic spectrometer at Fermilab. The DA system read out 24000 channels in 50 uS. Events were accepted at the rate of 9000 per second. Eight large FIFOs were used to buffer event segments, which were then compressed and formatted by 54 processors housed in 6 VME crates. Data was written continuously to 42 Exabyte tape drives at the rate of 9.6 Mb/s. During the 1991 fixed target run at Fermilab, 20 billion physics events were recorded on 24000 8 mm tapes; this 50 Tb (Terabyte) data set is now being analyzed.

18 pages and 4 figures

References in corpus (1)

• Using Multiple RISC CPUs in Parallel to Study Charm Quarks

Cited by in corpus (8)

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• Search for Rare and Forbidden Charm Meson Decays D0--> V l+ l- and h h l l
• Asymmetries in the Production of ${\Lambda }_c^{+}$ and ${\Lambda }_c^{-}$ Baryons in 500 GeV/c ${\pi }^{-}$ Nucleon Interactions
• Asymmetries in the production of lambda zero, cascade minus, and omega minus hyperons in 500 GeV/c pi minus-Nucleon Interactions
• Differential cross sections, charge production asymmetry, and spin-density matrix elements for D*(2010) produced in 500 GeV/c pi^- nucleon interactions
• Redundant Arrays of IDE Drives
• Observation of D-pi Production Correlations in 500 GeV pi- - N Interactions
• Study of the decay $D^0\to K^{-}{K}^{-}{K}^{+}{\pi }^{+}$