The ToolDAQ DAQ Software Framework & Its Use In The Hyper-K & ANNIE Detectors

Queen Mary University, London UK

^* e-mail: b.richards@qmul.ac.uk

Published online: 17 September 2019

Abstract

DAQ software is often a little-considered part of an experiment, with many experiments either using a rigid, heavily convoluted multi experiment framework or custom built software that lacks features and is fragmented. Equally these solutions tend not to be fault tolerant, scalable, distributed, dynamic to hardware changes or easy to produce. Presented here is ToolDAQ a C++ DAQ framework which has been designed to be easy and fast to develop for in a modular and simple way. It has many features such as in-built service discovery, dynamic reconfiguration, remote control/monitoring via web and terminal interfaces and a highly scalable fault-tolerant network communication infrastructure provided by ZeroMQ (ZMQ) built in. It is also compatible with newer and older hardware, both being very lightweight and with low dependencies. The framework is currently in use on the Accelerator Neutrino Neutron Interaction Experiment (ANNIE) in Fermilab and has been used to develop the DAQ for Hyper Kamiokande (Hyper-K) , whose implementations and use cases we will discuss, as well as many other places like stand-alone hardware and the intermediate water Cherenkov detector (E61) at J-PARC.