I. THE HIGH-LEVEL TRIGGER OF THE ALICE

High-level trigger systems (HLT) are necessary in order to cope with the anticipated data rate of future High-Energy experiments. The planned HLT for the ALICE experiment consists of a cluster of off-the-shelf PCs connected with a high bandwidth network. One of its elements is a custom-made PCI card, which receives the detector data, the so called Read-Out Receiver Card (RORC). It is the input port for detector data into the HLT computing farm and is mounted in some of its PCs. The main device of the RORC is an FPGA, which is necessary to implement the PCI-bus protocol. On the other hand, it can also be used to assist the host processor with first-level processing of the incoming raw data like cluster finding or Hough Transform for track reconstruction