A software solution for the control, acquisition, and storage of CAPTAN network topologies

The Electronic Systems Engineering department of the Computing Division at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is developing a data acquisition system that is flexible and powerful enough to meet the demands of pixel and strip detectors for high energy physics applications, but also capable of far broader application utility. To facilitate data acquisition and processing as well as system configuration and control, a stacked system was devised with support for gigabit Ethernet networking. The individual unit within the system is known as a Compact And Programmable daTa Acquisition Node, or CAPTAN. The platform’s flexibility is achieved through the ability to stack specialized boards, both vertically and horizontally, to create an integrated system that can be optimized for each user and application. The CAPTAN’s main interface is via the Universal Datagram Protocol of the Internet Protocol (UDP/IP). The software solution presented in this paper is at the other end of the UDP/IP interface, and must orchestrate communications. The software must take a modular approach to its command library to give the user a unique and extensible vocabulary with which to communicate with ever advancing readout chip technologies and varying configurations of the specialized boards within a CAPTAN. The software must also handle multiple CAPTANs, each producing gigabits of data per second, thus the solution presented here provides an option to employ distributed computing for CAPTAN network topologies involving large amounts of data.