The E787 Data Distributor (DD) is a UNIX based event buffer
manager, originally developed for the AGS rare kaon
experiment E787. It is written entirely in C and currently
runs on SGI and HP.
It allows to distribute events to processes
in real time in a multiprocessor environment for data
reduction, event building, online event analysis and
monitoring. The bookkeeping is done with a software
implementation of FIFOs (first in, first out) using
shared memory and semaphores.
In the following sections we first describe the philosophy of
DD system. Its use in the E787 experiment is as an example on
how to implement it in HEP experiments.
In the second section we describe the routines that are
relevant for the user, followed by a section in which
a few typical example programs are presented.
Chapter 5 describes how the user can customize
the DD system, followed by a section on the user interface.
The network connection of the DD system is under
complete revision and its description is (temporarily)
omitted.
The last section is a list of FAQ.