Before presenting my contributions to the field of interest, I shall give a description of the high-energy physics environment. Chapter 2 outlines the purpose of data acquisition and the challenges which have to be faced in present-day experimental set ups. We calculate the quantitative capacity requirements for two different approaches to the problem of data acquisition in the given experiment. From these we derive the main requirement columns that have to be met by software for distributed data acquisition systems, in chapter 3. The first attempt to meet these needs is to apply a commercial-off-the-shelf solution. An evaluation of the CORBA distributed component middleware is given in chapter 4. The assessment of the evaluated technology leads us to investigate other approaches. The description of such a custom-made object invocation scheme and the components that are related to it, is given in chapter 5. We review existing solutions for the management of distributed systems in chapter 6. A novel architecture that reflects the requirements of the system under study is proposed and presented in chapter 6.3. We summarise what we learned from investigating software components for high performance data acquisition in chapter 7.
In this chapter we gave an introduction to out work, but we did not yet explain what the application domain is about. It is necessary to introduce the goals and working habits of high energy physics to understand the strong need for efficiency and flexibility. These often conflicting properties are much more distinct than in other fields of natural sciences. The amounts of data are enormous and the rate at which information flows exceeds that capabilities of todays information processing devices. Where this data avalanche comes from and with which models we can address its handling will be the topic of the next chapter.