and Timing System
R. Kwarciany, K. Biery, G.E. Cooper, S. Foulkes, G. Guglielmo, B. Haynes, Vladimir Pavlicek, Luciano Piccoli, M. Votava · 2007
NOvA (E929) isalongbaseline experiment thatwill search for neutrino oscillations. Therewill beonedetector nearthebeamsource at Fermilab, andonedetector innorthern Minnesota. TheDAQ system for thefardetector collects over-threshold hits fromover450,000 channels of scintillator readouts, sorts thetime-stamped datapackets andarchives selected timeperiods ofdatafortransmission andprocessing. Whilea simple point-to-point protocol isusedforthefirst level ofdatacollection, Ethernet waschosen asthefabric fortherestoftheDAQ.Thepacket time-stamp andoverall system synchronization isbasedontwocommon- viewGPStrained clockoscillators, oneateachsite. Thepresent design cost-effectively satisfies theexperiment's moderate speedanddatavol- umerequirements.