Design, performance and control of the CDF Run II data acquisition system

The Run II data acquisition (DAQ) system of the CDF detector at Fermilab's Tevatron accelerator has been operational since July 2001. CDF DAQ has collected over 350 inverse picobarns of proton-antiproton collision data with high efficiency. An overview of the design of the pipelined, deadtime-less trigger and data acquisition system will be presented. CDF can receive and process a maximum crossing rate of once per 132 ns, with the rate reduced in three stages to the final output of approximately 1 to 2 terabytes per day. The DAQ system is controlled and monitored via a suite of Java based control software, with connections to front end VME crate processors running VxWorks/C and back end Oracle databases. Included are a flexible and easy to use run control Java application and associated system monitoring applications, both stand-alone and web based. The performance and operational experience of three years will be presented, including data taking efficiencies and through-put, and the role of intelligent software in tagging and solving problems. We also review future upgrades designed to increase data collection rates to cope with increased Tevatron luminosity.