Fast control and data acquisition in the neutral beam test facility

Fast control and data acquisition are required in the ion source test bed of the ITER neutral beam test facility, referred to as SPIDER. Fast control will drive the operation of the power supply systems with particular reference to special asynchronous events, such as the breakdowns. These are short-circuits among grids or between grids and vessel that can occur repeatedly during beam operation. They are normal events and, as such, they will be managed by the fast control system. Cycle time associated to such fast control is down to hundreds of microseconds. Fast data acquisition is required when breakdowns occur. Event-driven data acquisition is triggered in real time by fast control at the occurrence of each breakdown. Pre- and post-event samples are acquired, allowing capturing information on transient phenomena in a whole time-window centered on the event. Sampling rate of event-driven data acquisition is up to 5 MS/s. Fast data acquisition may also be independent of breakdowns as in the case of the cavity ring-down spectroscopy where data chunks are acquired at 100 MS/s in bursts of 1.5 ms every 100 ms and are processed in real time to produce derived measurements. The paper after the description of the SPIDER fast control and data acquisition application will report the system design based on commercially available hardware and the MARTe and MDSplus software frameworks. The results obtained by running a full prototype of the fast control and data acquisition system are also reported and discussed. They demonstrate that all SPIDER fast control and data acquisition requirements can be met in the prototype solution.