Operating experience with a multiple‐processor system for data acquisition and reduction in nuclear physics Free

A multiprocessor system based on commercially available VMEbus components has been developed for the acquisition and reduction of event‐mode data in nuclear structure physics experiments. The system contains seven 68000 CPU’s and 14MB of memory. A simple operating system handles data transfer and task allocation, and a compiler for a specially designed event analysis language produces code for the processors. Design considerations are discussed for the hardware and software, with emphasis on the differences in requirements between nuclear and high‐energy physics applications. The system has been in operation for four years at the University of Pennsylvania Tandem Accelerator Laboratory. Computation rates several times that of a MicroVAX II have been achieved at a fraction of the cost. A recent improvement to the system has been the addition of WORM optical disks which allow the processing of gigabyte data sets without operator intervention.