Data acquisition system of over Giga-Bps of data rate for user experiment at X-ray Free-Electron Laser facility SACLA

The data acquisition and control system for user experiments at the X-ray Free Electron Laser facility, SACLA, has been in stable operation since March 2012. The system handles up to 5 Gbps throughput of X-ray imaging data that are produced by a mega-pixel two-dimensional detector, in synchronization with the 60 Hz of the beam repetition cycle. In the autumn of 2014, a new beamline, now under construction, will be in commissioning towards the public use. The data acquisition system will be upgraded to handle two data streams from simultaneous experiments on two beamlines. A tag number distribution system and the MADOCA II framework provide more flexibility and robustness for the system. A 90 TFLOPS supercomputer has been set up this spring, to cope with the anticipated increase in the of users' requirement for the analysis of large data sets.