Operating System studies for DAQ Applications
Paper: 459
Session: B (talk)
Speaker: Ambrosini, Giovanna, Universitaet Bern
Keywords: commodity computing, control systems, data acquisition systems, PC operating systems, monitoring systems
Operating System studies for DAQ Applications
L.Tremblet et al.
CERN, CPPM, Univ. Bern, Univ. Pavia
ATLAS Collaboration
The prototyping work being done for the data acquisition (DAQ) system of
the ATLAS experiment at the LHC has provided the environment to
explore the applicability of commercial operating systems to DAQ
applications.
LynxOS, a real-time UNIX-like operating system, and the
WindowsNT operating systems have been studied from the point of
view of the application environment by using an existing DAQ system. This
latter is both a source for deriving micro-benchmarks and a demanding
application which has been used as a real life, domain specific, macro
benchmark.
Micro-bencharks have been defined and used to study the performance
behaviour in areas such as interrupt latency, context switching and
semaphore flipping. Two full DAQ systems, the RD13 DAQ system
and the Spider DAQ system, have been ported respectively to the LynxOS
and WindowsNT environments and have been used for global DAQ performance
measurements.
Software portability studies between UNIX and WindowsNT have also been
carried out.
We report results and conclusions on the above studies which have been
performed on VME processor cards: a PowerPC based RIO-8060 card
from CES in the case of LynxOS
and an Pentium based VMIVME-7587 card from the VMIC company (a
PC packaged as a VME board).