Merging several separate data acquisition systems at GANIL

The Grand Accelerateur National d'lons Lourds (GANIL) as a National User's Facility must answer to the problems of synchronization for the coupling of resident and external acquisition systems. For this a solution made up of a C-size VXI electronics called CENTRUM (Wittwer, 2004) and of software named MERGER was adopted. The technique used for synchronization is based on the distribution of a 32-bit event number or a 48-bit timestamp. The tagged events sent by the various acquisition systems on the network are assembled by MERGER in a single event and sent for the analysis and storage