The Design of MIDAS - A Modular Interactive Data Analysis System

A specialized computer facility, designed to provide a highly interactive, graphics-oriented, multi-user environment for the high-speed reduction and analysis of experimental data, is currently Under construction at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. The major difficulties in achieving high-speed data analysis (CPU limitations and I/O band-width restrictions) are minimized with MIDAS by using multiple CPU's to parallel-process the data and by utilizing multiple I/O busses with intelligent controllers to permit parallel, asynchronous data transmission to external memory blocks, which then may be switched dynamically to any processor. For data reduction, MIDAS should provide a processing power of about one CDC 7600 per user. Software utilization of the parallel architecture will be relatively transparent to the user, with analysis codes written in Fortran. Prototype tests of this facility are scheduled for summer, 1981.