A distributed data acquisition system for nuclear detectors

Nowadays, many examples of data acquisition (DAQ) software for experimental nuclear physics are monolithic processes that run on a computer attached to the DAQ hardware. In this article we present a distributed DAQ system developed for the C-BORD project. With our system, we propose a novel approach, in which each task related to the different DAQ parts (acquisition, preprocess, analysis, etc.) runs in a separate process. In particular, the system is composed of a set of servers that exchange information through dedicated communication sockets. Therefore, with this architecture, an important advantage is the possibility to run the processes on different computers to distribute the computational load. The initial tests of the system have been giving excellent results, both in terms of performance (i.e., maximum acquisition rates) and stability. The project entitled "Effective container inspection at BORDer control points" (C-BORD) is funded by the European H2020 programme. Its aim is to develop a comprehensive set of technologies for the generalized non-intrusive inspection (NII) of containers and large-volume freight at the European Union border.