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Persistent URL http://purl.org/net/epubs/work/36504
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Record Id 36504
Title The New ISIS Instrument Control System
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Abstract Data acquisition, instrument control and data analysis has traditionally been performed at ISIS using a VMS based computer system. This setup has served us well fo many years, but has recently been showing signs of strain. New instruments such as MAPS and GEM are generating very large data sets and the transfer rate of the VMS-SCSI-Data Acquisition Electrons (DAE) link (~2Mb/s) means ending an experiment can take a considerable amount of time. In addition new sample environment equipment often comes with an off the shelf PC driver, which means that either the VMS machine must talk to the PC over the network (two machines + communications to worry about) or a separate VMS driver must be written (development + debugging time). A decision was taken to make use of commercially available software where possible. The new ISIS Engineering diffractometer instrument, ENGIN-X, will require shot run start/stop times to perfom "stroboscopic" measurements and so a new setup has been devised. The second generation ISIS DAE (known as DAE-II) is based around a VME crate, and so we have chosen to make use of a commercially available PC VME interface (MXI-II from National Instruments) which gives us a sustained transfer rate of 23Mb/s and comes with a driver library for rapid application development. LabView, alsofrom National Instruments, has been chosen as the sample environment Moving away from our VMS system has also given us an opportunity to review the format used to store our RAW data. We have chosen to use the NeXus format, and a draft ISIS NeXus raw data format is being refined. This paper will provide an overview of the new ISIS Instrument control system, which is currently being used on the new ENGIN-X Engineering diffractometer instrument.
Organisation CCLRC , ISIS , ISIS-GEN , ISIS-ENGIN-X
Keywords ISIS 2007 , Engineering
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Language English (EN)
Type Details URI(s) Local file(s) Year
Preprint 2002. Submitted to: NOBUGS (NOBUGS2002), NIST, . 2002