Experiences with the application of LAN emulation in a data acquisition system

We applied for the first time the ATM technology and the LAN Emulation protocol in an existing data acquisition system. The distributed data acquisition system, based on standard host computers connected via TCP/IP over ethernet to processors in VME crates was upgraded using ethernet to ATM bridges and ATM switches. The maximum data rates in the new situation are a factor of five higher than in the previous architecture because the VME processors have individual bottleneck-free network connections to the host computer. This system scales with the available ATM network bandwidth and host computer CPU power.