Introduction to PANDA Data Acquisition System

Abstract Due to the anti-proton annihilation at Darmstadt (PANDA) experiment has rich physics studies with different event selection criteria and very high interaction rate of 2x107 /s and data rates of 200 GB/s and more, a high performance and high bandwidth data acquisition system without hardware trigger has been proposed. The data from various sub-detector systems are tagged by a very precise timestamp in front-end electronics. Event selection based on real time feature extraction, filtering and high level correlations will be executed on Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA) compliant compute nodes. As a key element, the compute node that features high bandwidth connectivity and large memory for data buffering will be detailed. A demonstrator system for the electromagnetic calorimeter has been built to set up a basic system that can be interfaced to front-end electronics.