AN IMPROVED DATA-ACQUISITION SYSTEM AT THE SASKATCHEWAN-ACCELERATOR-LABORATORY

An improved data acquisition system has been in service at the Saskatc hewan Accelerator Laboratory for the past 14 months. The system has sh own itself to be reliable and easy to use having collected over 800 gi gabytes of data for a number of experiments. The system is based on a VME front end computer acquiring data from CAMAC and FASTBUS modules a nd forwarding the data via an Ethernet connection to an acquisition wo rkstation for archiving and on-line analysis. A multiprocesssor real-t ime operating system in the front end computer makes increasing the pe rformance of the system a simple matter of adding an additional proces sor to the VME chassis. Experimenters need only write a high-level des cription of their experiment which is transformed into a C program for the front end computer by a translation program. Special requirements are met by facilities for direct inclusion of user C or FORTRAN code.