Visualisation and control

Control of the data acquisition in the case of Exogam will be via the standard acquisition system, since the TIARA signals will be fully integrated. Control of the amplifiers will be via a stand-alone PC operating CAENet software. Control of the discriminators will be through the MIDAS system that is incorporated in the Exogam data acquisition. When the GANIL data acquisition system is used, it can control everything using its own version of MIDAS, except the amplifiers which will again be controlled via CAENet. Visualisation of the data during experiments will be achieved using the SUNsort package developed and maintained at Birmingham. This operates on a SUN workstation and spies on data that is broadcast on a local ethernet by the data acquisition system. Both of the data acquisition systems envisaged for TIARA are compatible with this approach, which neatly decouples the on-line analysis from the acquisition and storage. The SUNsort package offers great flexibility for the processing of the data into one and two-dimensional spectra with extensive software gating capabilities and the simple inclusion of calculated virtual ADC values derived from the raw data values: all properties that are extremely advantageous in charged-particle experiments. As a part of the on-going development of SUNsort, opportunities will be sought to adapt it to run on operating systems other than SUN's Solaris system. In particular, options will be assessed for porting it to a Linux platform, and a small contribution of effort should be provided for this by the TIARA project to supplement other effort from elsewhere.