Configuration and supervision of advanced distribuited data adquisition and processing systems for long pulse experiments using JINI technology.

Abstract

The development of tools for managing the capabilities and functionalities of distributed data acquisition systems is essential in long pulse fusion experiments. The intelligent test and measurement system (ITMS) developed by UPM and CIEMAT is a technology that permits implementation of a scalable data acquisition and processing system based on PXI or CompactPCI hardware. Several applications based on JINI technology have been developed to enable use of this platform for extensive implementation of distributed data acquisition and processing systems. JINI provides a framework for developing service-oriented, distributed applications. The applications are based on the paradigm of a JINI federation that supports mechanisms for publication, discovering, subscription, and links to remote services. The model we implemented in the ITMS platform included services in the system CPU (SCPU) and peripheral CPUs (PCPUs). The resulting system demonstrated the following capabilities: (1) setup of the data acquisition and processing to apply to the signals, (2) information about the evolution of the data acquisition, (3) information about the applied data processing and (4) detection and distribution of the events detected by the ITMS software applications. With this approach, software applications running on the ITMS platform can be understood, from the perspective of their implementation details, as a set of dynamic, accessible, and transparent services. The search for services is performed using the publication and subscription mechanisms of the JINI specification. The configuration and supervision applications were developed using remotely accessible (LAN or WAN) objects. The consequence of this approach is a hardware and software architecture that provides a transparent model of remote configuration and supervision, and thereby a means to simplify the implementation of a distributed data acquisition system with scalable and dynamic local processing capability developed in a fusion environment.