  The data acquisition system of the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron
Collider will employ an event builder which will combine data from about 500
data sources into full events at an aggregate throughput of 100 GByte/s.
Several architectures and switch technologies have been evaluated for the DAQ
Technical Design Report by measurements with test benches and by simulation.
  This paper describes studies of an EVB test-bench based on 64 PCs acting as
data sources and data consumers and employing both Gigabit Ethernet and Myrinet
technologies as the interconnect. In the case of Ethernet, protocols based on
Layer-2 frames and on TCP/IP are evaluated. Results from ongoing studies,
including measurements on throughput and scaling are presented.
  The architecture of the baseline CMS event builder will be outlined. The
event builder is organised into two stages with intelligent buffers in between.
The first stage contains 64 switches performing a first level of data
concentration by building super-fragments from fragments of 8 data sources. The
second stage combines the 64 super-fragments into full events. This
architecture allows installation of the second stage of the event builder in
steps, with the overall throughput scaling linearly with the number of switches
in the second stage. Possible implementations of the components of the event
builder are discussed and the expected performance of the full event builder is
outlined.
