NA48 is a CERN experiment which studies CP violation by measuring ratios of K0 decays at a very high level of precision. One of the key elements of the NA48 data acquisition system is a Meiko CS-2, a European, parallel, scalable supercomputer maintained and manufactured by Quadrics Supercomputer World . The CS-2 was made available to CERN in the framework of the ESPRIT project GP-MIMD2. The experiment's high data rate (7 MBytes/sec initially and up to 20 MBytes/sec in 1997) and high data volume (40 TBytes of raw data in the 120 days of physics data taking foreseen in 1997) require the parallel and scalable I/O facilities, parallel file system and large computing capacity provided by the CS-2 [*]. Storage and data management have to exploit these hardware features, thus hiding the physical location of thee data from the user.
In general, the storage system requirements for this class of high-performance data acquisition system can be outlined as follows:
