A Distributed Processing Data Acquisition System at Brookhaven National Laboratory

The Tandem Van de Graaff at BNL has been using a computerized data acquisition system for more than eight years. A brief history of its philosophy and performance will be discussed. Also to be presented is the new data collection system which is designed around a high-speed bus with multiple processors. This new system is capable of handling event rates of over 200 kHz for add-one to memory (PHA) type spectra totalling 512k channels. List-mode, special sorting involving gating, or arithmetic operations of the data are supported in addition to one or two parameter PHA types. The system allows eight configurations of eight devices to be defined by the user. The devices are typically analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), multi-channel scalers, or routing devices. However any device with digital information could be interfaced.