Architectures of High-Throughput Data Acquisition Systems

Data acquisition systems are crucial to the success of large physics experiments, particularly in high-energy physics at the LHC. These systems are built mostly from commercially available components, but the extreme and unusual requirements of data acquisition require sophisticated architectures to work reliably. Scalability is one of the most important properties of any such architecture, because the requirements are almost always underestimated and growing physics reach almost always means more data. After a brief historical review of data acquisition techniques, mostly in particle physics, I will discuss a few important issues in data transfer on local area networks and in data reception. I will present an outline of the most advanced LHC DAQ systems and discuss new technologies, which are studied for the upgraded DAQ systems.