Maximum Integrated Data Acquisition System


MIDAS is a data acquisition package developed at the Paul Scherrer Institute, Switzerland, and TRIUMF, Canada. It was designed for particle detectors using CAMAC and VMEbus hardware.
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Description

MIDAS 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, Microsoft 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 980 kB/s, 8.7 MB/s and up to 98 MB/s. 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.

Usage of MIDAS

MIDAS is used in many experiments in nuclear and particle physics. Following list shows a few of them: