'FASTBUS' - A description, a status report, and a summary of ongoing projects

FASTBUS is a modular data and control bus and mechanical packaging standard currently under development. It is being funded by the United States Department of Energy and fully supported by the European ESONE Committee. FASTBUS is being designed to meet the high-speed data acquisition and parallel and distributed processing requirements of the next generation of large-scale physics experiments. It is a multiprocessor system with multiple bus segments which operate independently but link together for passing data. It operates asynchronously to accommodate very high and very low speed devices over long and short paths, using handshake protocols for reliability. It can also operate synchronously without handshakes for transfer of data blocks at maximum speed. The motivation for developing FASTBUS, its goals, history and organizational structure are summarized. Its features such as bus protocols, sparse data scan capabilities, power supplies and mechanics, bus segmentation and parallel processing structures, etc. are described. European and United States systems being proposed or built using FASTBUS along with hardware and software projects to aid in the standard or system development are discussed. The paper concludes by reviewing the present state of and development schedules for the FASTBUS standard. (orig.)