Overview of the instrument control and data reduction software in the Sandia data acquisition system at the Nevada Test Site

Sandia National Laboratories has developed a sophisticated custom digital data acquisition system to record data from a wide variety of experiments conducted on nuclear weapons effects tests at the Nevada Test Site (NTS). Software is a critical part of this data acquisition system. In particular software has been developed to support an instrumentation/experiment setup database, interactive and automated instrument control, remote data readout and processing, plotting, interactive data analysis, and automated calibration. Some software is also used as firmware in custom subsystems incorporating embedded microprocessors. The software operations are distributed across the nearly 40 computer nodes that comprise the NTS Wide Area Computer Network. This report is an overview of the software developed to support this data acquisition system. The report also provides a brief description of the computer network and the various recording systems used.