SPY: a monitoring system for the silicon vertex detector of CDF

Summary form only. With the advent of silicon multistrip revelators, the problem of monitoring all their channels (in the present case approximately 40000) in a relatively short time, before or during data acquisition, becomes important. To do that, a system has been developed that takes data from the 'serial' front-end of the relevator and processes them in an online style, giving the results to the Experiment Computer Cluster. This is done with 12 boards accommodating two 2048 words*27 bits FIFOs each, that will hold an event, and with a computing engine (a 30-MHz 38030 with 12 MBytes of RAM) with one Ethernet port to connect it to the other computers. >