The 12th International School of Trigger and Data Acquisition (ISOTDAQ) will introduce those with an education in physics, engineering or computing (ranging from undergrads to postdocs) to the arts and crafts of triggering and acquiring data for physics experiments. The school will be held from 10th - 19th February 2021, at INFN & DFA “E. Majorana” in Catania, Italy.

The school will provide an up-to-date overview of the basic instruments and methodologies used in high-energy physics, spanning from small experiments in the lab to the gigantic LHC experiments, presenting the main building blocks, as well as the different solutions and architectures at different levels of complexity.

The main topics of the school include the basics of Data Acquisition (DAQ) programming concepts (e.g. threaded programming, data storage, networking, I/O programming, FPGA programming), hardware bus systems (VMEbus, PCIe, MicroTCA), basic Trigger Logic and Hardware (NIM) as well as intelligent trigger systems based on Associative Memories and GPUs. PC based readout and trigger design will also be covered with reviews of modern TDAQ systems from LHC and fixed target experiments.

The school consists of 50% lectures (given mainly by physicists and engineers working daily on complex TDAQ systems) and 50% of practical exercises where students will be able to work in small groups on a wide variety of electronics components of TDAQ systems. The main aim of the school is to provide students with a wide but introductory level of the TDAQ domain. It will also be of interest to students from other research domains such as astrophysics or nuclear physics.

Please find more information (including application instructions) at our website: https://indico.cern.ch/e/isotdaq2021.

Application deadline is November 1st, 2020.

E-mail: isotdaq.schools@cern.ch