NSLS Beamline Control and Data Acquisition Computer-System Upgrade

S. Kate Feng-Berman, D. Peter Siddons, and Ivan So
National Synchrotron Light Source
Brookhaven National Laboratory

John Skinner and Robert M. Sweet
Brookhaven National Laboratory


The NSLS beamline computer systems have gone through two major updates: 1) a graphical user interface (GUI) was incorporated into the original data-acquisition program ACE to form the new composite program GrACE, 2) we adopted the unix-like operating system Linux to run on a Pentium PC. With a proper PC CMOS setup, and a PCI local-bus graphics card, the LINUX X server on a Pentium is dramatically accelerated to run GUI applications. With in-house-designed CAMAC and MCA device drivers, and a public-domain GPIB device driver, we can run the original beamline-control and data-acquisition program without changing the computer-interface hardware. The updates produce effective, low-cost, and user-friendly computer systems.