Abstract
The data acquisition system of the CMS experiment, at the CERN LHC collider, is designed to build 1 MB events at a sustained rate of 100 kHz and to provide sufficient computing power to filter the events by a factor of 1000. The data to surface (D2S) system is the first layer of the data acquisition interfacing the underground subdetector readout electronics to the surface event builder. It collects the 100 GB/s input data from a large number of front-end cards (650), implements a first stage event building by combining multiple sources into larger-size data fragments, and transports them to the surface for the full event building. The data to surface system can operate at the maximum rate of 2 Tbps. This paper describes the layout, reconfigurability and production validation of the D2S system which is to be installed by December 2005.