The use of MDSplus on NSTX at PPPL

• Published in: Fusion engineering and design Vol. 60; no. 3; pp. 247 - 251
• Main Authors: Davis, W., Roney, P., Carroll, T., Gibney, T., Mastrovito, D.
• Format: Journal Article Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 01.06.2002; New York, NY Elsevier Science
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Computer aided diagnosis; Computer aided software engineering; Computer workstations; Controled nuclear fusion plants; Data acquisition; Data management; Data visualization; Energy; Energy. Thermal use of fuels; Exact sciences and technology; Hierarchical systems; Installations for energy generation and conversion: thermal and electrical energy; MDSplus; NSTX; Visualization; MDSplus; Data management; Data acquisition; NSTX; Data visualization; Computer science; Nuclear fusion reactor; Data analysis; Data acquisition system; Nuclear reactor
• ISSN: 0920-3796; 1873-7196
• DOI: 10.1016/S0920-3796(02)00016-9

The MDSplus data acquisition system has been used successfully since the 1999 startup of NSTX for control, data acquisition and analysis for diagnostic subsystems. For each plasma “shot” on NSTX about 75 MBs of data is acquired and loaded into MDSplus hierarchical data structures in 2–3 min. Physicists adapted to the MDSplus software tools with no real difficulty. Some locally developed tools are described. The support from the developers at MIT was timely and insightful. The use of MDSplus has resulted in significant cost savings for NSTX.