The ALICE experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) presents what may possibly be the biggest ever challenge for a data acquisition system: moving colossal quantities of data from the experiment area to the Grid without slowing down the readout of the detectors.

The ALICE data acquisition system is presently radically improved in order to keep up with the increased luminosity of the machine for LHC Run 3 and beyond. Many more links will be used to move ~3.5 TB/s to the surface. A brand new framework, named O2 (Online-Offline) will handle the increased data throughput, with an expected output data stream of ~100 GB/s.

ALICE Data Acquisition (DAQ): Link to the Poster