An integrated system for nuclear data acquisition

A system is presented for use in Nuclear Physics Data Acquisition. The system is hosted on a Personal Computer's ISA bus, and is based on the TMS320C31 digital signal processor (DSP), a fast floating point DSP that simultaneously handles several different tasks in this system, by means of an interrupt-driven architecture. The system includes three different data acquisition modules: a multi-channel analyzer, a multi-channel scaler, and a signal analyzer. Using the interrupt-driven architecture, the DSP pre-processes the data coming from the three different data acquisition modules, and accepts data requests from the host PC. On the PC side, the system runs under Microsoft Windows 95 or Windows NT, and it implements the client-server model. While the data acquisition board performs its chores independently, the host PC sends it several commands on behalf of an arbitrary number of clients. Those clients each represent a window over the data being acquired, allowing different users to take different views of the data. Each client can run on the same host computer or on any other computer, provided there is a computer network (the Internet is a possibility, as long as there is enough bandwidth) connecting it to the host. This allows the experimentalist to remotely examine the experimental results from his office without having to go to the lab. On the other hand, different experimentalists can have different views of the data being acquired. All these are benefits stemming from the client-server model.