Speaker
Sylvain Chapeland
(CERN)
Description
ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is the heavy-ion detector designed to study
the physics of strongly interacting matter and the quark-gluon plasma at the CERN
Large Hadron Collider (LHC). A large bandwidth and flexible Data Acquisition System
(DAQ) has been designed and deployed to collect sufficient statistics in the short
running time available per year for heavy ion and to accommodate very different
requirements originated from the 18 sub-detectors. The Data Acquisition and Test
Environment (DATE) is the software framework of the DAQ, handling the data from the
detector electronics up to the mass storage.
This paper reviews the DAQ software and hardware architecture, including the latest
features of the final design, such as the handling of the numerous calibration
procedures in a common framework. We also discuss the large scale tests conducted on
the real hardware to assess the standalone DAQ performances, its interfaces with the
other online systems and the extensive commissioning performed in order to be fully
prepared for physics data taking scheduled to start in November 2007. The test
protocols followed to integrate and validate each sub-detector with DAQ and Trigger
hardware synchronized by the Experiment Control System are described. Finally, we
give an overview of the experiment logbook, and some operational aspects of the
deployment of our computing facilities.
The implementation of a Transient Data Storage able to cope with the 1.25 GB/s
recorded by the event-building machines is covered in a separate paper.
| Submitted on behalf of Collaboration (ex, BaBar, ATLAS) | ALICE |
|---|
Author
Sylvain Chapeland
(CERN)
Co-authors
Csaba Soós
(CERN, Geneva, Switzerland)
Ervin Dénes
(KFKI-RMKI, Budapest, Hungary)
Ferhat Ozok
(Istanbul University, Istanbul, Turkey)
Filimon Roukoutakis
(CERN, Geneva, Switzerland)
Franco Carena
(CERN, Geneva, Switzerland)
Irina Makhlyueva
(CERN, Geneva, Switzerland)
Klaus Schossmaier
(CERN, Geneva, Switzerland)
Ozgur Cobanoglu
(INFN Turin, on leave from Istanbul University, Istanbul, Turkey)
Pierre Vande Vyvre
(CERN, Geneva, Switzerland)
Roberto Divià
(CERN, Geneva, Switzerland)
Sergio Vergara
(Benemerita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla, Mexico)
Tivadar Kiss
(KFKI-RMKI, Budapest, Hungary)
Tome Anticic
(Ruder Bošković Institute, Zagreb, Croatia)
Ulrich Fuchs
(CERN, Geneva, Switzerland)
Vasco Barroso
(CERN, Geneva, Switzerland)
Wisla Carena
(CERN, Geneva, Switzerland)
