128 channel PCI-based data acquisition system for MDSplus

With the increasing demand for analogue channel acquisition on the TCV tokamak, a new PCI based acquisition has been specified, designed, built and installed into our MDSplus acquisition environment. The design criteria were to not only improve the cost/channel, as compared to our conventional hub based acquisition (CAMAC), but to provide some distributed processing power to avoid the associated acquisition server saturation, both in terms of CPU and network bandwidth. These units were initially intended to satisfy the requirements of general variable rate acquisition from a variety of sources, and many channel acquisition from modern multi-channel diagnostics. Hosted by a i386-Linux PC in a crate with four available PCI slots, each single-PCI slot 32-channel digitiser features sampling frequencies tip to 200 kHz, and 64 MB of memory, providing 1 Msample of 16-bit data per channel. The local hard disk is used for immediate local storage of all the acquired data from the selected channels into a local MDSplus database. The host is then accessed as a MDS/IP server that provides, on demand, down-sampled and software filtered traces. The local hard disk capacity is used for medium to long-term storage and availability of the full data set with optional mirror technology to guard against hard disk failure. We have thus obtained a general solution for high resolution, multi-channel routine acquisition using the multi-platform MDSplus environment, in which different software and hardware architectures are intelligently linked across a standard TCP/IP network. The implementation presented here uses ONLY standard components of the MDSplus environment. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.