Development of a Data Acquisition System for the BaBar CP Violation Experiment

Experiences developing data acquisition system for the BaBar CP violation experiment located at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center are presented. The BaBar detector consists of multiple independent subdetectors joined with a data acquisition system consisting of a large number of embedded PowerPC single board computers residing in VME crates. The data acquisition software is layered on the VxWorks real-time operating system. It is partitionable to allow subsystems (as well as test stands) to operate independently. Data is assimilated into events through a combination of shared memory and a high performance network. This system presents data to a UNIX farm via a high speed non-blocking ethernet switch at a rate of 2 KHz. Topics such as bootstrapping and loading 200 processors, NFS file access for these processors and software development and deployment are discussed.