The implementation of the STAR data-acquisition system using a Myrinet Network

We present results from the first year of operation of the STAR data-acquisition (DAQ) system using a Myrinet Network. STAR is one of four experiments to have been commissioned at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory during 1999 and 2000. The DAQ system is fully integrated with a Level 3 Trigger. The combined system currently consists of 33 Myrinet Nodes, which run in a mixed environment of MVME processors running VxWorksj DEC Alpha workstations running Linux, and SUN Solaris machines. The network will eventually contain up to 150 nodes for the expected final size of the L3 processor farm. Myrinet is a switched high-speed low-latency network produced by Myricom and available for PCI and PMC on a wide variety of platforms. The STAR DAQ system uses the Myrinet Network for messaging, L3 processing, and event building. After the events are built, they are sent via gigabit ethernet to the RHIC computing facility and stored to tape using HPSS. The combined DAQ/L3 system processes 160-MB events at 100 Hz, compresses each event to 20 MB, and performs tracking on the events to implement a physics-based filter to reduce the data storage rate to 20 MB/s.