During the next decade, upgrades to the DOEs two leading particle accelerators, the Continuous Electron Beam Acceleration Facility and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), will lead to enormous increases in the rate at which data is produced. For example, at the RHIC, an anticipated increase in luminosity by a factor of about 40 will lead to a requirement to store 1000 events per second instead of the 1 event per second originally foreseen. This project will design and build a high performance data acquisition and processing system that features both very high bandwidth I/O and powerful data processing capability. Recent advances in commodity electronics will allow the system to be less expensive than existing systems. Phase I will build a prototype data acquisition card and install it in the detector system of the RHIC. Tests will be conducted to demonstrate that the card is capable of the high bandwidth I/O necessary for the data transport expected after the planned luminosity upgrade.
Commercial Applications and Other Benefits as described by the awardee: Although designed with the needs of high data rate colliders in mind, the data acquisition system should be configurable for any number of physics experiments where high bandwidth data transport and processing is required. Other applications include three-dimensional seismic processing and bioinformatics
