DART/spl minus/data acquisition for the next generation of Fermilab fixed target experiments

DART is the name of the data acquisition effort for Fermilab experiments taking data in the '94-'95 time frame and beyond. Its charge is to provide a common system of hardware and software, which can be easily configured and extended to meet the wide range of data acquisition requirements of the experiments. Its strategy is to provide incrementally functional data acquisition systems to the experiments at frequent intervals to support the ongoing DA activities of the experiments. DART is a collaborative development effort between the experimenters and the Fermilab Computing Division. Experiments collaborating in DART cover a range of requirements from 400 Kbytes/sec event readout using a single DA processor, to 200 Mbytes/sec event readout involving 10 parallel readout streams, 10 VME event building planes and greater than 1000 MIPs of event filter processing. We describe the requirements, architecture, and plans for the project and report on its current status.<
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