Data analysis software on the FTU experiment and its recent developments

A general purpose data analysis and display program, named SHOW, has been developed over the years as the answer to the needs of the experimentalists working on FTU, a high magnetic field tokamak devoted to the study of plasma behaviour both with ohmic and additional heating. The description of the main characteristics of the SHOW program can be seen as a summary of many of the facilities required by the experimental physicists in their data analysis activity. Some of these facilities rely heavily on the program architecture, that derives from the awareness that only a very flexible structure permits an easy adaptation to the changing requirements of the data analysis activity. The program has been developed in FORTRAN on the IBM mainframe (running MVS-ESA) where the main FTU databases are located. The GDDM package has been used to implement the interactive user interface, based on panels, and the graphic display facilities, that include 2- and 3-D plot sections. The program provides utilities for the evaluation of derived quantities (as integrals, derivatives, smoothing filters) and for the time series analysis. A spread-sheet section permits the analysis of tables of data. A quantitative analysis of the utilisation of the SHOW program is also presented, during a period of >3 years. In the last year a preliminary version of the program has been ported to the UNIX environment, on a DEC Alpha workstation, and the user interface has been realised making use only of libraries available for free. A client/server software has been developed so that the IBM mainframe can still be used as a file server.