| Thesis | |
| Report number | CERN-THESIS-97-019 |
| Title | The Evolution of Software Technologies to Support Large Distributed Data Acquisition Systems |
| Author(s) | Jones, Bob (CERN) |
| Publication | 184. |
| Thesis note | PhD : Sunderland U. : 1997 |
| Thesis supervisor(s) | Smith, Peter ; Parrington, Norman |
| Note | Presented 01 Sep 1997 |
| Subject category | Computing and Computers |
| Accelerator/Facility, Experiment | CERN LHC ; RD-13 |
| Abstract | A study of software technologies for the control and configuration of data acquisition systems for high energy physics experiments is presented. Three key software technologies have been identified that impact the control and configuration tasks, namely, inter-process communication systems, configuration data storage techniques and graphical user interface toolkits. Investigations and developments of suitable software to meet the unique requirements of large distributed data acquisition systems were carried out at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics. The research programme was applied to four successive data acquisition system development projects from 1989 to 1997. The thesis describes the evolution of the three software technologies over this period in terms of advances and developments made within the framework of the data acquisition projects. For inter-process communication systems, the use and relative merits of remote procedure calls, publish/subscribe systems and object-oriented communications complying to the Object Management Group’s Corba standard are described and compared. The work on configuration data storage techniques compares a range of technologies from relational databases, to object managers and object databases. In terms of graphical user interface toolkits, various custom-made and commercial software packages are described that provide distributed windowing facilities in a local-area network on a variety of devices including character-cell terminals and bit-mapped workstation screens. A comparison on windowing toolkits and associated graphical user interface builder CASE tools is included. The work and findings presented are supported by 13 published papers selected from a total of 27 for their emphasis on the three software technologies. |
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Record created 2024-02-13, last modified 2024-11-12
