Effects of various event building techniques on data acquisition system architectures

The preliminary specifications for various new detectors throughout the world including those at the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) already make it clear that existing event building techniques will be inadequate for the high trigger and data rates anticipated for these detectors. In the world of high‐energy physics many approaches have been taken to solving the problem of reading out data from a whole detector and presenting a complete event to the physicist, while simultaneously keeping deadtime to a minimum. This paper includes a review of multiprocessor and telecommunications interconnection networks and how these networks relate to event building in general, illustrating advantages and disadvantages of the various approaches. It presents a more detailed study of recent research into new event building techniques which incorporate much greater parallelism to better accommodate high data rates. The paper lists trends in data acquisition system needs giving specific requirements and a proposed arc...