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Daresbury computing facility report
Steve Kinder
Daresbury Laboratory, Synchrotron Radiation Department
Daresbury Laboratory is a mature site
with more than 25 years of experience in the production and exploitation
of synchrotron radiation using the
SRS.
In this talk I will begin with a brief review of history and a description of
the structure we have in place for the computing support of this important
facility.
The computing hardware on site is highly heterogeneous and a 'village' concept
has evolved to support the requirements of the many different
science projects.
Having reviewed the structure I will then give a brief overview, with some
highlights, of machine control, data acquisition and data analysis as
developed at Daresbury.
A mix of Unix, PC, VME and proprietary hardware systems provides data
acquisition on a wide range of experimental stations.
GUIs have been extensively developed using Motif with distributed
client-server programming to support them (e.g.
Non-Crystalline Diffraction,
Protein Crystallography,
X-Ray Spectroscopy).
PC software based on DOS is now out-growing that platform and migrating to
Windows with GUIs under development using Labwindows, visual Basic/C (e.g.
X-Ray Diffraction).
Staff at Daresbury support a wide range of data analysis packages
(e.g. excurv,
LAUE)
and the lab also hosts a number of
Collaborative Computational Projects
(CCPs).
Finally I will conclude with some description of projects in the pipeline and
suggestions for further collaboration.
A number of posters will support our presence at NOBUGS '97.
(posted 17-Oct-97 jw)