IEEE Trans. Nucl. Sci. IEEE Trans. Nucl. Sci. 0018-9499 A 32 Terabit/s Data Acquisition from Mostly COTS Components Schwemmer Rainer CERN Neufeld Niko CERN 2015 62 1747 1751 The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) data acquisition after 2019 will need to perform event-building at an aggregated band-width of 32 Tbit/s. Apart from the technological challenges described in various papers also at this conference, the key challenge is to come up with an architecture which minimises the cost, while providing a system which can be maintained by a small team for a long time and which scales well. In this paper we present the analyses we have been doing to minimise the cost, the R&D; topics we derived from that and how we combined all this into a coherent proposal which allows us to come up with a system which not only today fits the budgetary constraints of LHCb, but also will allow profiting from any main-stream technological development. We achieve this by aligning our system needs as much as possible to data-centre mass-market commercial of the shelf (COTS) products; by minimising the number of optical interconnects and by optimising the physical layout of the system. This system requires only one piece of custom-made hardware, and even this could, for a smaller setup be replaced by a commercially available item. We believe that the reasoning behind this design can be beneficial to any large, high-rate data acquisition system. research-article