Data acquisition upgrade in the RFX experiment

The control and data acquisition system of RFX has been completely renewed and is currently under re-commissioning. ata acquisition is now performed by means of CompactPCI (CPCI) devices supervised by Pentium PCs running Linux. Real-time control systems, implemented using VME and PowerPCs running VxWorks, also produce data that are then acquired by the data acquisition system. The older CAMAC systems have only been retained for existing diagnostics. New diagnostic systems will employ either CompactPCI data acquisition or custom solutions, usually running under Windows, due to the fact that the drivers for the used devices are normally available for this platform. Despite the variety of hardware and software platforms involved in data acquisition, the same software package is used for all components, thus providing a uniform view of the system. Such functionality is provided by the MDSplus software. MDSplus is now available for a variety of platforms, and includes several Java components that are platform-independent.