The LANSCE data acquisition system and SMARTS

To meet the data acquisition requirements for five new neutron scattering i nstruments at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE), we are buildi ng new systems using Web tools, commercial hardware and software, software developed by the controls community, and custom hardware developed by the n eutron scattering community. To service these new instruments as well as se ven existing instruments, our data acquisition system needs common software and hardware core capabilities and the means to flexibly integrate them wh ile differentiating the needs of the diverse instrument suite. We report th e features offered by our architecture that wilt simultaneously be function al and flexible, and then summarize the progress for hardware and software that can in fact meet the performance requirements demanded. We show how on e of the five new instruments, the Spectrometer for Materials Research at T emperature and Stress, SMARTS, proposes to use the LANSCE data acquisition system for experiments that integrate event counting, real-time data analys is, and slow controls.