The Data Acquisition and Control Systems

Layout of the data acquisition system (DAQ)

Layout of the data acquisition system (DAQ) for FLASH – similar for the accelerator and the experiments: Currently a SUN work station carrying 16 SPARC processors running at 1.2 GHz, with 32 GB of working memory, 4 x 1-Gbit Ethernet and 1.7-TB local storage is employed as the DAQ server. Temporarily the data is stored on a 24-TB local disc before being sent to the tape storage.

The control and data acquisition systems for FLASH are based on DOOCS , a Distributed Object-Oriented Control System, and they run on Solaris and Linux machines with an interface to Windows. The control system of FLASH consists of 900 fast and 500 slow data channels producing up to 100 MByte/s of data depending on the operation mode.

The control system functions are divided into a device layer containing servers with a direct connection to hardware, a middle layer for communication between different devices or data processing, and an application level offering not only data display but also other tools like LabView, Python, and MATLAB.

The data acquisition system is dedicated to the following tasks: collecting beam-relevant data in real time, providing the data to feedback and monitoring tools as well as storing it for offline analysis. The system provides means for remote machine and beamline operations, and also enables storing user experiments data in parallel streams to make further correlations between the experimental measurements and the state of the accelerator on a bunch-by-bunch basis.