The Swedish Vacuum Solar Telescope data-acquisition and control systems

Abstract

The performance of commodity computer systems doubles approximately every 18 months. Traditionally, the design of scientific data-acquisition and control systems has tended to ignore this fact, relying instead on custom hardware developments using the technology available at the time of instrument specification. Moreover, development manpower is usually limited, causing relatively long development cycles. Often the the result is that an instrument is technologically obsolete quite early in its projected lifetime. In contrast, all the digital processing for data acquisition and control at the Swedish Vacuum Solar Telescope (SVST) on La Palma (Canary Islands) is performed with commodity workstations. The result is a flexible system with low development costs that can easily take advantage of the latest microprocessor advances. The SVST's use of commodity workstations in on-line real-time tasks is in large part made possible by its use of reconfigurable interface technology. Indeed the SVST has been a valuable proving ground for this technology. This article summarizes the instrumentation of the SVST and illustrates examples of data recorded with this instrumentation.