MDSSPLUS DATA-ACQUISITION SYSTEM

MDSplus, a tree based, distributed data acquisition system, was develo ped in collaboration with the ZTH Group at Los Alamos National Lab and the RFX Group at CNR in Padua, Italy. It is currently in use at MIT, RFX in Padua, TCV at EPFL in Lausanne, and KBSI in South Korea. MDSplu s is made up of a set of X/motif based tools for data acquisition and display, as well as diagnostic configuration and management. It is bas ed on a hierarchical experiment description which completely describes the data acquisition and analysis tasks and contains the results from these operations. These tools were designed to operate in a distribut ed, client/server environment with multiple concurrent readers and wri ters to the data store. While usually used over a Local Area Network, these tools can be used over the Internet to provide access for remote diagnosticians and even machine operators. An interface to a relation al database is provided for storage and management of processed data. IDL is used as the primary data analysis and visualization tool. IDL i s a registered trademark of Research Systems Inc. (C) 1996 American In stitute of Physics.