Commonalities and differences between MDSplus and HDF5 data systems

MDSplus is a data acquisition system widely used in nuclear fusion experiments. It defines a file format for pulse files and provides a set of tools for data acquisition and management. The whole MDSplus package is used in several fusion experiments to set up and supervise the data acquisition process. Other experiments use only the data management layer of MDSplus to provide a common format for data exchange between plasma fusion laboratories.