A.R.I.E.L. On-Line Experimental Data Acquisition and Reduction

ARIEL is a collective system conceived in an Institute having 3 particle accelerators and a Nuclear Spectrometry center, in order to allow several research teams to incorporate a powerful computer into their experimental equipment. ARIEL uses a 360/50 IBM to handle simultanéously 4 remote, independent, on-line experiments. The machine runs in a multiprogramming mode under an operating system IBM OS 360 MFT that we modified to do simultaneously several real-time jobs. We have connected to the computer specilly designed units implementing data acquisition, graphic and literal dialogue with the experimenter and the data reduction and editing of the results. A large software using supervisor extensions enables the scientist a simple FORTRAN use of all these units, starting from the preparation of the experiment to the editing of the final results. ARIEL has been designed in 1965, making use of the experience gained by the use during several years of a first collective system (1961). About a hundred different experiments performed on ARIEL since 1968 showed us the value of the choices we made.