A Data Acquisition and Experiment Control System for High-Data-Rate Experiments at the National Synchrotron Light Source

A data acquisition and experiment control system for experiments at the Biology Small-Angle X-ray Scattering Station at the National Synchrotron Light Source has been developed based on a multiprocessor, functionally distributed architecture. The system controls an x-ray monochromator and spectrometer and acquires data from any one of three position-sensitive x-ray detectors. The average data rate from the position-sensitive detector is ~ 106 events/sec. Data is stored in a one megaword histogramming memory. The experiments at this Station require that x-ray diffraction patterns be correlated with timed stimuli at the sample. Therefore, depending on which detector is in use, up to 103 time-correlated diffraction patterns may be held in the system memory simultaneously. The operation of the system is functionally distributed over four processors communicating via a multiport memory.