The idea has arisen to use the fast ethernet tester board, which has been developped in the group, for another purpose. At a relatively modest cost, 8 of these boards could be built to provide 256 emulated ROB ports. These could be integrated with some 256 Linux PCs fitted with Fast/Gigabit Ethernet NICs to provide a testbed of approximately 25% the size of the ATLAS Level-2 system.

More information on this application of the ROB tester board can be found in the following documents:

• ROB emulator functionality and packet format definition

 
• ROB emulator presentation given by M. LeVine at the Reference Software Mini Workshop, CERN, 8-9 June 2000. Also available in Gzipped Postscript and Powerpoint formats.