The Use of MDSplus on NSTX at PPPL
Authors: W. Davis, P. Roney, T. Carroll, T. Gibney, and D. Mastrovito
Date of PPPL Report: March 2002
To be published in: Fusion Engineering and Design. Presented at the 3rd IAEA Technical Committee Meeting on Control, Data Acquisition and Remote Participation for Fusion Research, Padova, Italy, July 16-20, 2001.
The MDSplus data acquisition system has been used successfully since the 1999 startup of NSTX [National Spherical Torus Experiment] for control, data acquisition, and analysis for diagnostic subsystems. For each plasma "shot" on NSTX about 75 MBs of data is acquired and loaded into MDSplus hierarchical data structures in 2-3 minutes. Physicists adapted to the MDSplus software tools with no real difficulty. Some locally developed tools are described. The support from the developers at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] was timely and insightful. The use of MDSplus has resulted in a significant cost savings for NSTX.