The DABC Framework Interface to Readout Hardware

Abstract

The Data Acquisition Backbone Core (DABC) is a new GSI software framework to run a data acquisition with distributed event building on high performance Linux clusters. Experiment specific front-end electronics is to be integrated to the software by means of hardware interface plug-ins like Device and Transport classes. DABC offers elaborate mechanisms for multiprocessing, buffer management, and dataflow throttling. These are transparently available for all implemented plug-ins. Device plug-ins can link a DABC node to remote readout hardware via network connections like Ethernet. Other Device plug-ins can communicate on the Linux device driver level with custom boards directly inserted at the node.Besides delivering the data input, a DABC Device can also provide control access to the connected hardware. This functionality can be used for setting up, or monitoring the front-ends from the application via DABC parameters and commands. An implementation example is a multipurpose PCI Express Optical Receiver (PEXOR) board developed at GSI. This board features an FPGA and 4 optical links and may be used for various front-ends, depending on the FPGA programming. A kernel driver and the DABC Device plug-in for this board have been developedand tested. They are described here with some performance benchmark results.As another example, DABC is applied for data taking during test beam times of the Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) experiment from 2008 to 2010. Here the front-end readout controller boards (ROC) were integrated to the DABC hardware interface, both for a UDP based Ethernet protocol, and for optical connections to a custom PCIe board.

A fast centrality-meter for heavy-ion collisions at the CBM experiment

“…The MVD together with STS are placed in the gap of a dipole magnet with magnetic field of 1 Tm. A Ring Imaging CHerenkov [44] detector is used to identify electrons from decay of low mass vector meson decay while high energy electrons and positrons are identified using the Transition Radiation Detector. Resistive Plate Chambers based Time Of Flight (TOF) measurements are used to identify hadrons [45].…”

Characterization of silicon micro-strip sensors with a pulsed infra-red laser system for the CBM experiment at FAIR

“…Data acquisition is performed using the Data Acquisition Backbone Core (DABC) [18] framework and Go4 Analysis software [19] is used for on-line object analysis. The optical links are used for data transmission from the read-out controller boards (ROC) to the control PC.…”