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High Rate Data Acquisition
The new DAQ system features Field Programmable Gate Array based electronic boards and optical data transmission. An FPGA-based custom network with optical links inside the detector and a commercial Gigabit Ethernet infrastructure transports data to the server farm. The custom optical network features high bandwidth, low latency bi-directional data transport. All data are transported via this network on dedicated virtual channels: trigger information, event data and slow-control information.
~7 billion Au+Au events have been recorded in 2012. The mean data rate during the flat top of the extracted beam was 100 MBytes/s at an event rate of 10 kHz. This corresponds to 20% of the peak performance of the DAQ system.