VME Multiprocessor System for Data Acquisition at OSIRIS

A VME multiprocessor system for data acquisition and data display utilizing several MC68XXX based CPUs and VMEbuses is described. The design of the VME system was stimulated by the data handling requirements of experiments using the anti-Compton spectrometer OSIRIS, i.e. data storage on optical disks and on-line accumulation of large 2-dimensional histograms (4096 x 4096 channels). Due to the general approach the VME system is easily applicable for other nuclear physics experiments.