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, focus is on multi-threading, web interface (JSON).
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.
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.
- Provides the mean to configure your hardware.
- Manages the data flow and the control flow.
- Provides tools for data collected monitoring (console and web applications).
- Implement experiment access security.
- Records the data to common storage media (disk, tape, ftp).
- Include programming layer to interface the data stream to your favorite data analysis package.
Overall Midas system diagram
A graphical view of the generic acquisition components forming the MIDAS DAQ
Midas Core
A general description of the different components composing the Midas Data Acquisition package