The use of MDSplus on NSTX at PPPL

The MDSplus data acquisition system has been used successfully since the 1999 startup of NSTX for control, data acquisition and analysis for diagnostic subsystems. For each plasma “shot” on NSTX about 75 MBs of data is acquired and loaded into MDSplus hierarchical data structures in 2–3 min. Physicists adapted to the MDSplus software tools with no real difficulty. Some locally developed tools are described. The support from the developers at MIT was timely and insightful. The use of MDSplus has resulted in significant cost savings for NSTX.