Wolfgang Ott

The new data acquisition system at GSI

The new general purpose data acquisition system developed at GSI is currently installed at about 30 experiments at GSI and other sites. It is based on the LynxOS operating system. Several CPUs, i.e. GSI developed CAMAC computer boards, VME processor boards, and Aleph Event Builders, are connected by a memory mapped bus, i.e. a VSB or VME bus. It can be configured easily for various hardware setups and is highly optimized for fast trigger rates and data throughput. The first and successful experiment taking data with the system was the SHIP production run for elements 110 and 111.

Design and implementation of a data transfer protocol via optical fiber

Future experiments at the new accelerator facility FAIR (Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research) for the research with ion and anti-proton beams require new developments of front-end electronics to tolerate high data rate. We have developed a PCIe card and front-end cards equipped with the small form-factor pluggable (SFP) transceivers for the data transfer via optical fiber. A new protocol has been designed and implemented on the FPGAs in order to provide communication between the PCIe card and the front-end cards. The standard data acquisition (DAQ) system at GSI, multi-branch system (MBS), has been upgraded to support the PCIe cards and is working stably with the data transfer rate up to 180 Mbytes per second.

Data acquisition, analysis, and monitoring for cancer therapy at GSI

Summary form only received as follows: A system of three dimensional raster scanning carbon beams used for cancer therapy has been designed and built at GSI and has been in operation since the end of 1998. The front-end real-time system is based on VME boards with DSPs designed and built at GSI. The system is operated in two modes: first, the treatment mode. The beam is steered automatically according the patients treatment plan. During the treatment a real-time visualization of the scanning process is required without any possibility of distortion. Therefore all needed data measured by the front-ends is sent from one of the DSPs via a separate bus to a sufficiently big memory located in a different VME crate. A processor in this crate sends the data as it arrives in the memory via TCP to the monitor program running on an AIX machine where it is displayed in nearly real-time. In experimental mode the same system is used for quality control of the beam before the treatment. The measured beam positions and shapes are sent through the same data channel to an analysis package developed at GSI. Both, monitoring and analysis, use IDL from Research Systems Inc. for visualization.