The LANSCE data acquisition system and SMARTS

To meet the data acquisition requirements for five new neutron scattering instruments at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center; (ANSCE), we are building new systems using Web tools commercial hardware and software, software developed by the controls community, and custom hardware developed by the neutron scattering community. To service these new instruments as well as seven existing instruments, our data acquisition system needs common software and hardware core capabilities and the means to flexibly integrate them while differentiating the needs of the diverse instrument suite. We report the features offered by our architecture that will simultaneously be functional and flexible, and then summarize the progress for hardware and software that can in fact meet the performance requirements demanded. We show how one of the five new instruments, the Spectrometer for Materials Research at Temperature and Stress, SMARTS, proposes to use the LANSCE data acquisition system for experiments that integrate event counting, real-time data analysis, and slow controls.