next up previous contents
Next: Contents


How to use the Silicon Farm
H1 Silicon Tracker Data Monitoring

Version 0.0 Markus Kausch October 17, 1997

This document describes the use of the Silicon Farm for data monitoring purposes. After a brief explanation of the hardware involved, the layout of the code belonging to the full SiFarm task is sketched. The farm has two main tasks:

  1. Handling Slow Control commands that control the detectors or the Control- and ReadOut modules.
    This is done via a communication protocol that handles Slow Control Requests from a Macintosh (MacVEE) and passes the requests to their destination (via VMETaxi).
  2. Monitoring the performance of the Online data processors.
    The farm spies on the Silicon FrontEnd data that have been formatted by the PowerPC boards. This incoming data stream can then be evaluated further, e.g. by running algorithms used in the offline reconstruction, or by processing raw data using PowerPC code and thus monitoring the performance of the online hit finding.

The code is separated into a firmware part which keeps the system running and handles the communication processes between the farm and the outer world and a user part which allows the implementation of whatever you want to do for Monitoring.

The farm is capable of filling histograms which can be displayed on a Macintosh. The use of the histogram package is described as well as the Control application for the Farm tasks.

The concept and most of the existing software is not the author's work. The Silicon Farm was designed and programmed by Gareth Noyes (RAL). This document therefore can only represent the pedestrian's approach towards making the farm usable. It is not intended to be a reference guide!


!! WORKING DOCUMENT - SUBJECT TO MODIFICATION !!




next up previous contents
Next: Contents

Markus Kausch
Fri Oct 17 14:02:27 MST 1997