Loss less real-time data compression based on LZO for steady-state Tokamak DAS

The evolution of data acquisition system (DAS) for steady-state operation of Tokamak has been technology driven. Steady-state Tokamak demands a data acquisition system which is capable enough to acquire data losslessly from diagnostics. The needs of loss less continuous acquisition have a significant effect on data storage and takes up a greater portion of any data acquisition systems. Another basic need of steady state of nature of operation demands online viewing of data which loads the LAN significantly. So there is strong demand for something that would control the expansion of both these portion by a way of employing compression technique in real time. This paper presents a data acquisition systems employing real-time data compression technique based on LZO. It is a data compression library which is suitable for data compression and decompression in real time. The algorithm used favours speed over compression ratio. The system has been rigged up based on PXI bus and dual buffer mode architecture is implemented for loss less acquisition. The acquired buffer is compressed in real time and streamed to network and hard disk for storage. Observed performance of measure on various data type like binary, integer float, types of different type of wave form as well as compression timing overheads has been presented in the paper. Various software modules for real-time acquiring, online viewing of data on network nodes have been developed in LabWindows/CVI based on client server architecture.