Introduction

What is Midas

"MIDAS" is an acronym for Maximum Integrated Data Acquisition System.

MIDAS is a general-purpose system for event-based data acquisition in small and medium scale Physics experiments. It is an on-going development at the Paul Scherrer Institute (Switzerland) and at TRIUMF (Canada), since 1993. Presently, on-going development is focused on the interfacing capability of the MIDAS package to external applications such as ROOT for data analysis (see Data Analyzers).

MIDAS is based on a modular networking capability and a central database system. MIDAS consists of a C library and several applications, which can run on many different platforms (i.e. operating systems) such as UNIX-like, Windows NT, VxWorks etc. While the system is already in use in many laboratories, the development continues with addition of new features and tools. Recent developments involve multi-threading, FGPA/Linux support, MSCB extension. For the latest status, check the MIDAS home page: Switzerland , Canada

MIDAS is for small and medium sized experiments

MIDAS has been designed for small and medium experiments. It can be used in distributed environments where one or more frontends (application acquiring the data from the hardware) are connected to the backend (application handling the gathering of the data from the frontend and managing the run sequence) via the network (i.e.Ethernet).

What Midas can do for you

In a few words, Midas can:

• collect data from local and/or remote hardware sources.
• record to common storage media (disk, tape, ftp).
• control the data flow
• provide the tools to monitor the collected data

Overall Midas system diagram

A graphical view of the generic acquisition components forming the MIDAS DAQ

Midas Core

A general description of the different part composing the Midas Data Acquisition package