E787 data acquisition software architecture

Author

Burke, M. ; Felawka, L. ; Poutissou, R. ; Adler, S. ; Haggerty, J. ; Strzelinski, R. ; Witzig, C.

Author_Institution

TRIUMF, Vancouver, BC, Canada

Volume

41

Issue

1

fYear

1994

fDate

2/1/1994 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

131

Lastpage

134

Abstract

Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) Experiment 787´s second generation Unix-based data acquisition system is comprised of several independent programs, each of which controls a specific aspect of the experiment. These programs include packages for reading events from the hardware systems, analyzing and reducing the data, distributing the results to various data consumers, and logging the data to tape or disk. Most of these can be run in stand-alone mode, for ease of development and testing. There are also a number of daemon processes for writing special data records to the data streams, and several monitor programs for evaluating and controlling the progress of the whole. Coordination of these processes is achieved through a combination of pipes, signals, shared memory, and FIFOs, overseen by the user through a Motif graphical user interface. The system runs on a Silicon Graphics 4D/320, interfaced to a Fastbus system through the BNL Fastbus/VME interface (BBFC), and runs under Irix and Motif/X-windows

Keywords

Unix; data acquisition; physics computing; software engineering; BNL; Brookhaven National Laboratory; Experiment 787; FIFO; Fastbus; Fastbus/VME interface; Irix; Motif graphical user interface; Motif/X-windows; Silicon Graphics 4D/320; Unix-based data acquisition system; shared memory; software architecture; Control systems; Data acquisition; Fastbus; Hardware; Laboratories; Monitoring; Packaging; Software architecture; Testing; Writing;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Nuclear Science, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9499

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/23.281473

Filename

281473