Remote collaboration and data access at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility

As the number of on-site and remote collaborators has increased, the demands on the DIII-D National Program`s computational infrastructure has become more severe. The Director of the DIII-D Program recognized the increased importance of computers in carrying out the DIII-D mission and in late 1997 formed the Data Analysis Programming Group. Utilizing both software and hardware improvements, this new group has been charged with increasing the DIII-D data analysis throughput and data retrieval rate. Understanding the importance of the remote collaborators, this group has developed a long term plan that will allow for fast 24 hour data access (7x24) with complete documentation and a set of data viewing and analysis tools that can be run either on the collaborators` or DIII-D`s computer systems. This paper presents the group`s long term plan and progress to date.