Integrating a fast data acquisition system into the DOOCS control system

The VUV-FEL (Vacuum-Ultraviolet Free-Electron Laser) at DESY started recently its operation. As part of the Distributed Object-Oriented Control System (DOOCS) a novel Data AcQuisition (DAQ) System has been developed for this complex facility. To provide full diagnostics of all electron bunches, a fast ADC-based acquisition is used for collecting data from more than 800 channels at sampling rates of 1 to 9 MHz. The system allows data transfer rates of up to 100 MBytes per second to a central server. On this server data from all front end sources is synchronized and used by high level feedback and calculation programs. The data is stored for off-line analysis on a disk cache and eventually written to a tape server. A data volume of up to 70 TBytes per year is expected. The system implements technologies borrowed from High-Energy Physics experiments and integrate them fully into the existing DOOCS control system architecture.