Software Strategies and Hardware Upgrades to the PPL Data Acquisition System (DAS)

This paper describes upgrades to the Data Acquisition System for the Experimental Projects Department at PPPL, especially in support of the PBX-M upgrade to be completed this year. Hardware and software maintenance problems with the old configuration, consisting of a DEC KL-10 and eight PDP-11´s, are described. The real-time software and hardware performance requirements and projections for CAMAC I/O and data analysis and display are presented. Described are three applications that have realtime requirements and are located on separate processors, connected to PPPL´s VAX Cluster by an Ethernet link. Building upon a previous large software base, general-purpose subroutine libraries and utilities are being emphasized. The most useful of these are described. The use of software packages from DEC, third-party vendors, and the fusion community, is also described. The new approaches to software development that are being incorporated into the DAS efforts are discussed. Specific future challenges are also described.