  The Minos+ experiment is an extension of the Minos experiment at a higher
energy and more intense neutrino beam, with the data collection having begun in
the fall of 2013. The neutrino beam is provided by the Neutrinos from the Main
Injector (NuMI) beam-line at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab).
The detector apparatus consists of two main detectors, one underground at
Fermilab and the other in Soudan, Minnesota with the purpose of studying
neutrino oscillations at a base line of 735 km. The original data acquisition
system has been running for several years collecting data from NuMI, but with
the extended run from 2013, parts of the system needed to be replaced due to
obsolescence, reliability problems, and data throughput limitations.
Specifically, we have replaced the front-end readout controllers, event
builder, and data acquisition computing and trigger processing farms with
modern, modular and reliable devices with few single points of failure. The new
system is based on gigabit Ethernet TCP/IP communication to implement the event
building and concatenation of data from many front-end VME readout crates. The
simplicity and partitionability of the new system greatly eases the debugging
and diagnosing process. The new system improves throughput by about a factor of
three compared to the old system, up to 800 megabits per second, and has proven
robust and reliable in the current run.
