CAMAC, VXI, and PXI hybrid data acquisition system with MDSplus

The Hanbit mirror device is equipped with three kinds of data acquisition hardware: CAMAC; VME eXtensions for instrumentation (VXI); and PCI eXtensions for instrumentation (PXI). This hybrid system is managed by several MDSplus servers that are linked across a standard TCP/IP network. Each server directly acquires data from one or two frames of digitizers, analyzes data, and then archives them onto a hard disk to produce a high performance distributed data acquisition system (DAS). CAMAC modules are controlled by a Dec Alpha computer through the drivers provided together with MDSplus. Only small number of VXI and PXI drivers have been available until now. Therefore, an application is developed in C which utilizes the manufacturer-provided drivers for VXI and PXI. By sending commands to the application, MDSplus indirectly controls VXI and PXI. This paper will describe how the whole system is integrated and how it is controlled in a centralized manner.