The NA49 Data Acquisition System

NA49 is a fixed-target, heavy-ion experiment at the 200 GeV/nucleon Pb beam of the SPS at CERN, expected to take data in late 1994. Because of the unprecedented number of charged particles (up to 2000) emerging from a single Pb-induced nuclear reaction at these energies, the demands on various parts of the experimental setup are extreme. For the data acquisition system a burst input data rate of 750 Mbyte/sec from more than 150,000 electronic channels has to be buffered and compressed to allow the recording of events to magnetic media at rates around 15 Mbyte/sec with reasonable effort and cost. © 1994 IEEE