A Transputer Based Data Acquisition System for the Baikal Neutrino Telescope

This paper describes a reliable and extendable setup based on a transputer network and its application for data preprocessing and online monitoring of an underwater muon and neutrino detector. It is operated since April 1993 by a Russian-German group in Lake Baikal, Siberia. The net hardware was designed for medium scale experiments like the Baikal detector. It allows to set up extended transputer nets and to configure them dynamically at run time and has proved to be suitable for experiments carried out under rough environmental conditions, where the possibilities of system maintenance are limited but nevertheless computational power is needed. A small net consisting of five transputers is used as a basic component of the data acquisition system of the underwater detector currently operating.