A MODULAR VME DATA ACQUISITION SYSTEM FOR COUNTER APPLICATIONS AT THE GSI SYNCHROTRON

Particle counters perform the control of beam loss and slowly extracted currents at the heavy ion synchrotron (SIS) at GSI. A new VME/Lynx – PC/Linux based data acquisition system has been developed to combine the operating purposes beam loss measurement, spill analysis, spill structure measurement and matrix switching functionality in one single assembly. A detailed PC-side software description is presented in this paper. The software has been divided into time critical networking and data deploying threads and low or normal priority interface tasks to achieve best system stability. Some new abilities in the fields of data computation and presentation are described. First experiences gained while the commissioning of the system are discussed.