The new Data Acquisition system for the gravitational wave detector AURIGAhas been designed from the ground up in order to take advantage of hardware andsoftware platforms that became available in recent years; namely, i386computers running Linux-based free software. This paper describes how advancedsoftware development technologies, such as Object Oriented design andprogramming and CORBA infrastructure, were exploited to realize a robust,distributed, flexible, and extensible system. Every agent of the DataAcquisition System runs inside an heavyweight framework, conceived totransparently take care of all the agents intercommunication, synchronization,dataflow. It also presents an unified interface to the command and monitoringtools. The DAQ logic is entirely contained in each agent's specialized code. Inthe case of AURIGA the dataflow is designed as a three tier: frontend, builder,consumer. Each tier is represented by a set of agents possibly running ondifferent hosts. This system is well fit for projects on scales comparable tothe AURIGA experiment: permanent and temporary data storage is based on theFrame format adopted by the gravitational wave community, and the design isreliable and fault-tolerant for low rate systems.
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