A friendly tool to remotely follow-up fusion machines experiments

When the international collaborations gather around a project more and more geographically scattered participants, it is imperative for them to get tools to keep in touch with the laboratory hosting the experiment, to know about the ongoing operations or even to remotely participate in them. The CEA-IRFM developed ShotListener to meet these needs, which should appear for actual or future tokamaks. This Java application intercepts the main events of a discharge sequence and notifies the user with visual or sound alerts, allowing him to follow the distant experiments easily. An API based on an MDSplus server has been developed to insure communication with the local CODAC supervision system. This API translates the Tokamak events as MDSplus events, available for any subscribers. The java application ShotListener, available for Windows and Linux platforms as an auto-installable package, connects to the MDSplus server, subscribes to a list of shot events (customizable by the end-user) and sends a visual or sound alert when a selected event occurs. For example, depending on the selected events, the user can display an extract of the shots log or visualize the video of the pulse. This architecture is obviously suitable for any machine, as long as the specific API sending MDSplus events is implemented. The aim of this paper is to describe the detailed architecture of ShotListener, to present its different functionalities and to introduce some possible enhancements.