Fast Development of Real-Time Applications Using MDSplus and MARTe Frameworks

The recent long lasting fusion experiments introduced a change in paradigm for control and data acquisition. While formerly implemented by different systems, using different software and hardware solutions, new requirements, such as the need of handling a sustained data stream, the availability of powerful general-purpose computers and the evolution of Linux towards real-time responsiveness make an integrated solution nowadays feasible. In the fusion community several frameworks have been developed for control and data acquisition and some of them are shared among different experiments. In particular, MDSplus represents the most used framework for data acquisition and management, and MARTe is a framework for real-time applications originally developed at JET, but then adopted in several other experiments. Neither system can be used alone to provide integrated real-time control and data acquisition but, since their functionality complements, they can be used in conjunction. To achieve this, an additional layer has been developed so that data handled in real-time by MARTe components can be redirected to pulse file for storage. At the same time, configuration data, typically defined in the MDSplus experiment model, can be seamlessly transferred to MARTe GAMs during system configuration.