Developments to supplant CAMAC with industry standard technology at NSTX

Abstract

Abstract National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX), like other research programs, is facing an inevitable crisis due to end-of-life issues for its 20-year-old CAMAC instrumentation. In many cases, replacement components are not available, effectively rendering a CAMAC module unusable after a failure. The proliferation of high performance, reliable, low-cost commodity computing hardware and software based on industry standard technology can provide the basis for a new generation of instrumentation. At NSTX, there have been several advances towards developing a PCI-based model for data acquisition and control systems. New hardware developments include a High Performance Signal Conditioning board and an Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)-based Multifunction Timing System (MTS). Extensible software interfaces have been developed to integrate these boards into the NSTX computing environment [P. Sichta, J. Dong, G. Oliaro, P. Roney ‘Overview of the NSTX Control System,’ 8th International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems, San Jose, CA (2001)]. This paper will illustrate these developments and how they could be used to benefit collaborative fusion research.