A prototype of the read-out subsystem of the BESIII DAQ based on PowerPC

This article describes the prototype of the read-out subsystem which will be subject to the BESIII data acquisition system. According to the purpose of the BESIII, the event rate will be about 4000 Hz and the data rate up to 50 Mbytes/sec after Level I trigger. The read-out subsystem consists of some read-out crates and a read-out computer whose function is to initialize the hardware, to collect the event data from the front-end electronics after Level 1 trigger, to transfer data fragments to the computer in online form through two levels of computer pre-processing and high-speed network transmission. In this model, the crate level read-out implementation is based on the commercial single board computer MVME5100 running the VxWorks operating system.