Maximum Integrated Data Acquisition System

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For other uses of "MIDAS", see MIDAS (disambiguation).

MIDAS

Developed by	Paul Scherrer Institute, TRIUMF
Latest release	2.0.0 / November 2nd, 2007
OS	Cross-platform
Genre	Data acquisition
License	GPL
Website	MIDAS home page

MIDAS is a DAQ package developed at the Paul Scherrer Institute and TRIUMF. It was designed for particle physics experiments using CAMAC and VMEbus hardware.

[edit] Description

MIDAS (Maximum Integration Data Acquisition System) has been developed as a general purpose data acquisition system for small and medium scale experiments originally by Stefan Ritt in 1993, followed by Pierre-André Amaudruz in 1996. It is written in C and published under the GPL.

The experiment complexity ranges from test systems, where a single PC is connected to CAMAC via a PC-CAMAC interface, to experiments with several front-end computers and analysis nodes. The system currently runs under Linux, MS Windows, various versions of UNIX, VMS, VxWorks and MS-DOS and can be ported easily to virtually any operating system which supports TCP/IP sockets.

A speed optimized RPC layer is used for data exchange, with which sustained data rates of 980kB/sec (10BaseT), 8.7MB/sec (100BaseT) and up to 98MB/sec (1000BaseT). An integrated slow control system contains a fast online database and a history system. Drivers exist for CAMAC, VME, Fastbus, High Voltage Crates, GBIB and several PC plug-in DAQ boards. A framework is supplied which can be extended by user code for front-end readout on one side and data analysis on the other side. The online data can be presented by PAW as histograms and N-tuples as well as by ROOT. A dedicated HTTP server gives fast Web access for experiment control and to access the slow control system including a graphical representation of variable trends (history display).