ALICE Data Acquisition System Program of R&D Work

<P> The purpose of this paper is to initiate several activities for the data-acquisition and reduction system of the Heavy Ion Experiment ALICE at the LHC. <P> The purpose of the RD32 DRDC project is to develop a Time Projection Chamber (TPC) with a high double track resolution for ALICE. This detector will produce between 80 and 90% of the data volume of the whole ALICE experiment. The total data volume is expected to be in the order of 1 GBytes/sec. and, more severe, no on-line analysis or filtering could be envisaged yet. This will require a tremendous bandwidth from the front-end readout up to the storage device. <P> Research and development has already started in RD32 on the applicability of SCI to the ALICE TPC data-acquisition and reduction system. We propose to extend this work and to view it in the global perspective of the future ALICE DAQ architecture. Another area of particular importance for the ALICE TPC is the data reduction. Work is going on in NA49 on new algorithms for data reduction. We will take this work into account and investigate the architectures that supports these new techniques. The development of the ALICE DAQ architecture in close cooperation with the groups working on the development of the TPC and of the data reduction algorithms is crucial to design a coherent system which fulfills the requirements.