A New Design for Live Neutron Event Data Visualisation for ISIS and the ESS

Viewing and reducing event data live during an experiment is an important component of contemporary experiment control systems. At ISIS a simple TCP streaming mechanism for neutron event data allows data to be processed by Mantid during an experiment; however, this existing solution is likely to encounter performance issues with the new generation of acquisition hardware. As part of an ESS in-kind collaboration, ISIS is working on developing a new data streaming system based on Apache Kafka for managing and delivering live experiment data to multiple clients. This work provides an ideal opportunity to replace the existing ISIS streaming mechanism with this new system, which not only provides enhanced functionality for ISIS but also functions as a prototype for developing and testing requirements of the ESS.