A real-time data-acquisition and analysis system with distributed UNIX workstations

A compact data-acquisition system using three RISC/UNIX™ workstations (SUN™/SPARCstation™) with real-time capabilities of monitoring and analysis has been developed for the study of photonuclear reactions with the large-acceptance spectrometer TAGX. One workstation acquires data from memory modules in the front-end electronics (CAMAC and TKO) with a maximum speed of 300 Kbytes/s, where data size times instantaneous rate is 1 Kbyte × 300 Hz. Another workstation, which has real-time capability for run monitoring, gets the data with a buffer manager called NOVA. The third workstation analyzes the data and reconstructs the event. In addition to a general hardware and software description, priority settings and run control by shell scripts are described. This system has recently been used successfully in a two month long experiment.