The MDSplus data acquisition system, current status and future directions

The MDSplus data acquisition system was developed in collaboration with the ZTH group at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the RFX group at CNR in Padua, Italy and is currently in use at MIT, RFX in Padua, and TCV at EPFL in Lausanne. MDSplus is based on a hierarchical experiment description which completely describes the data acquisition and analysis tasks and contains the results from these operations. It also includes a set of X/motif based tools for data acquisition and display, as well as diagnostic configuration and management. These tools were designed to operate in a distributed, client/server environment with multiple concurrent readers and writers to the data store. An interface to a relational database is provided for storage and management of processed data. A commercially available package called IDL is used as the primary data analysis and visualization tool. The current projects include a new interface to the electronic logbook, tools for remote collaborators and WWW access, and a port of the system to UNIX and Windows-NT/95.