DATA ACQUISITION SYSTEM FOR A VUV-FEL LINAC

For the VUV-FEL (Vacuum-Ultraviolet Free Electron Laser) at DESY a 1 GeV superconducting LINAC [1] is used and presently being commissioned. The control system of the LINAC consists of 900 fast and 500 slow data channels producing up to 100 MByte/s of data depending on the LINAC operation mode. To study, control and archive the machine status and performance, a data acquisition system (DAQ) has been developed which allows storing machine parameters together with user experiment data. The system will provide the ability to correlate easily the accelerator status with experimental data on a bunch-by-bunch basis. The paper gives an overview on the architecture of the DAQ system and describes its main components in more detail