MDSplus. Current developments and future directions

MDSplus is a data handling software system used widely in the fusion research community. It provides tools for acquiring, storing and analyzing data from fusion experiments, simulations, and analysis codes. The system also provides a networking system that enables users to access data remotely from any computer on the Internet. The software is now available for most computing platforms. MDSplus is an open source package and as the user community grows, many tools and programs based on MDSplus are being developed at numerous fusion research sites. MDSplus is easily taught to access other data stores and is being used to provide a network gateway to fusion data stored in non-MDSplus formats. Many large physics codes are being fitted to use MDSplus as the primary means of data input and output, removing the necessity to build different versions of the code to access different data formats. This paper will describe where and how the software is currently being used, identify recent developments and enhancements to the system and present some of the planned improvements to the software.