Jefferson lab has a unique blend of requirements:

At other laboratories particles are collected in the accelerator over a period of time and fired at the target during a period of time known as a spill. The spill is typically of a duration shorter than the period between spills. This means that the mean data and event rates handled by the data acquisition system are, in many cases, smaller than the peak rates. This is taken advantage of in data acquisition systems by buffering data during the spill and processing the data slowly during the inter-spill gap. At Jefferson lab there is no off-spill period during which events may be processed or spooled from front end buffers. Data acquisition at Jefferson lab must deal with high, continuous event rates.

Unlike larger laboratories, such as Fermilab and CERN, where experiments are installed for many years, the Jefferson lab detectors are designed for many small duration experiments rather than one or two of long duration. This requires a customizable data acquisition system that can react rapidly to changing conditions. The data acquisition system must be able to adapt to reconfiguration on weekly or monthly time scales to differing event rates and sizes.

Since Jefferson lab was a newly constructed laboratory a data acquisition system was required for the detector development phase of the laboratories construction. There was history of data acquisition at the site to fall back on.

At Jefferson lab users will perform experiments in more than one hall. A common data acquisition system for all experiments gives the user a more consistent environment. From the hardware point of view spare parts and expertise are common to all experiments.

None of the existing data acquisition systems met these requirements.

The data acquisition group was formed as a central support resource for data acquisition at Jefferson lab. The group is charged with providing a uniform data acquisition environment meeting all the data acquisition requirements of the laboratory. The group is responsible for the development of software and hardware, it's implementation and the assistance of users. Part of that responsibility is the creation of adequate documentation. These web pages are an attempt to address that issue.