The central trigger control system of the CMS experiment at CERN

The Large Hadron Collider will deliver up to 32 million physics collisions per second. This rate is far too high to be processed by present-day computer farms, let alone stored on disk by the experiments for offline analysis. A fast selection of interesting events must therefore be made. In the CMS experiment, this is implemented in two stages: the Level-1 Trigger of the CMS experiment uses custom-made, fast electronics, while the experiment's high-level trigger is implemented in computer farms. The Level-1 Global Trigger electronics has to receive signals from the subdetector systems that enter the trigger (mostly from muon detectors and calorimeters), synchronize them, determine if a pre-set trigger condition is fulfilled, check if the various subsystems are ready to accept triggers based on information from the Trigger Throttling System and on calculations of possible dead-times, and finally distribute the trigger decision (``Level-1 Accept'') together with timing signals to the subdetectors over the so-called ``Trigger, Timing and Control'' distribution tree of the experiment. These functions are fulfilled by several specialized, custom-made VME modules, most of which are housed in one crate. The overall control is exerted by the central ``Trigger Control System'', which is described in this paper. It consists of one main module and several ancillary boards for input and output functions.