A High Speed Data Acquisition System for Fermilab Experiments

A high rate data acquisition system has been used to record some 40 million complex events in an experiment studying the hadroproduction of charm in Fermilab's Broad Band Neutral Beam. Event data is accumulated during the spill in large buffer memories without computer intervention through the University of Illinois Black Bin System. Between spills the memories are read by their FASTBUS ports to a PDP-11/45 for recording on magnetic tape. A sample of events is held for analysis by the program MULTI during the following spill.