The LHCb DAQ system

The LHCb experiment is the most recently approved of the 4 experiments under construction at CERN's LHC accelerator. It is a special purpose experiment designed to precisely measure the CP violation parameters in the B-B system. Triggering poses special problems since the interesting events containing B-mesons are immersed in a large background of inelastic p-p reactions. We therefore decided to implement a 4 level triggering scheme. The LHCb Data Acquisition (DAQ) system will have to cope with an average trigger rate of similar to 40 kHz, after two levels of hardware triggers, and an average event size of similar to 150 kB. Thus an event-building network which can sustain an average bandwidth of 6 GB /s is required. A powerful software trigger farm will have to be installed to reduce the rate from the 40 kHz to similar to 200 Hz of events written to permanent storage. In this paper we will concentrate on the networking aspects of the LHCb data acquisition and the controls system. 11 Refs.