Data Acquisition, Monitoring and Control Software for DETNI

Abstract

For neutron detection at next generation high-flux pulsed neutron sources three single-event counting detector types are presently being developed in the EU Joint Research Activity DETNI. This presentation is the result of a study aiming at the identification of the best software architecture suitable for the data acquisition, detector control and data analysis for all detector types which are being developed presently. The software has to be appropriate for the test and production phases which means for raw data acquisition, analysis and visualization. In addition the software has to work on Linux and Windows and the Root Framework shall be used. To achieve these goals a layered design with well defined tasks for each layer has been implemented. Moreover, almost every single task could be easily moved from software to the detector front-end FPGAs and vice versa. Every task is connected with its data type(-s); so different modules (software or hardware) can easily be separated and moved from/to the software. The whole design is done using standard C++ language together with Boost libraries and Qt for GUI in such a way that the software should compile and work on almost any platform.