Real Time Diagnostic Data Acquisition System for the Doublet III Tokamak Fusion Experiment

The Doublet III data acquisition computer system acquires, archives, and processes over three megabytes of data from each shot of the experiment. A shot lasts 1-2 seconds and occurs every 5-6 minutes with 50-100 shots/day. The data acquisition system has been configured to efficiently handle the increasing quantity of data as new plasma instruments are added (five megabytes within a year) and to provide interactive capability during operations. The configuration is a dual CPU system with a dual port disk and bulk core memory. One CPU is devoted to acquisition and archiving while the other CPU is for analysis and interactive use. This system has enabled improved shot-to-shot processing of plasma data thus providing guidance to the physics operations team. A planned upgrade of Doublet III will require data handling of over 20 megabytes/ shot.