A Flexible and Extensible Monitoring System for Large Scale Experiments

Publisher Summary This chapter constructs a flexible and extensible UNIX-based distributed monitoring system, consisting of data acquisition, distribution and monitoring subsystems. The acquisition subsystems transmit signals from physical targets by network multicasting. These signals and derived quantities (such as flow rate) are reconstructed on each network-connected workstation to form "'virtual targets of observation", from which the monitoring subsystems obtain quantities of physical interest. When separated from acquisition and distribution subsystems, monitoring subsystems can be easily designed. The monitoring performance can be arbitrarily increased by increasing the number of monitoring workstations in the network. To investigate the feasibility of such a system on standard workstation-based systems, the chapter experimented a UNIX-based distributed system on Ethemet. The conclusion is that it is possible to use such methods on the LHD.