Design, performance and control of the CDF Run II data acquisition system

The Run II data acquisition (DAQ) system of the CDF detector at Fermilab´s Tevatron accelerator has been operational since July 2001. CDF DAQ has collected over 350 inverse picobarns of proton-antiproton collision data with high efficiency. An overview of the design of the pipelined, deadtime-less trigger and data acquisition system will be presented. CDF can receive and process a maximum crossing rate of once per 132 ns, with the rate reduced in three stages to the final output of approximately 1 to 2 terabytes per day. The DAQ system is controlled and monitored via a suite of Java based control software, with connections to front end VME crate processors running VxWorks/C and back end Oracle databases. Included are a flexible and easy to use run control Java application and associated system monitoring applications, both stand-alone and web based. The performance and operational experience of three years will be presented, including data taking efficiencies and through-put, and the role of intelligent software in tagging and solving problems. We also review future upgrades designed to increase data collection rates to cope with increased Tevatron luminosity.