AN INTEGRATED SYSTEM FOR NUCLEAR-DATA ACQUISITION

A system is presented for use in Nuclear Physics Data Acquisition. The system is hosted on a Personal Computer's ISA bus, and is based on th e TMS320C31 digital signal processor (DSP), a fast floating point DSP that simultaneously handles several different tasks in this system, by means of an interrupt-driven architecture. The system includes three different data acquisition modules: a multi-channel analyzer, a multi- channel scaler, and a signal analyzer. Using the interrupt-driven arch itecture, the DSP pre-processes the data coming from the three differe nt data acquisition modules, and accepts data requests from the host P C. On the PC side, the system Ms under Microsoft Windows 95 or Windows NT, and it implements the client-server model. While the data acquisi tion board performs its chores independently, the host PC sends it sev eral commands on behalf of an arbitrary number of clients. Those clien ts each represent a window over the data being acquired, allowing diff erent users to take different views of the data. Each client can run o n the same host computer or on any other computer, provided there is a computer network (the Internet is a possibility, as long as there is enough bandwidth) connecting it to the host. This allows the experimen talist to remotely examine the experimental results from his office wi thout having to go to the lab. On the other hand, different experiment alists can have different views of the data being acquired. Al these a re benefits stemming from the client-server model.