Abstract
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HERA-B is a forward spectrometer which uses a 920 GeV proton beam
incident in various nuclear targets. The experiment is  aimed to
study various aspects of beauty and charm physics. The detector
is designed to operate with in average up to 4 interaction per
bunch crossing, corresponding to the primary interaction rate of
40 MHz. The first level trigger has to reduce the input rate by
more than two orders of magnitude while keeping the efficiency at a high
level for the B and C decay channels under investigation. The trigger
is performing online track reconstruction and taking decisions based on
the momenta of particles or masses of track pairs. A parallel and
pipelined system consisting  of about 100 dedicated processors has
been developed to perform this job. The working principle and the first
results of the first level trigger performance based on the data acquired
during the run in the year 2000 will be described.