Paper
19 July 2010 Integration of SCUBA-2 within the JCMT Observatory Control System
Author Affiliations +
Abstract
The high data rates and unique operation modes of the SCUBA-2 instrument made for an especially challenging effort to get it working with the existing JCMT Observatory Control System (OCS). Due to some forethought by the original designers of the OCS, who had envisioned a SCUBA-2 like instrument years before it was reality, the JCMT was already being coordinated by a versatile Real Time Sequencer (RTS). The timing pulses from the RTS are fanned out to all of the SCUBA-2 Multi Channel Electronics (MCE) boxes allowing for precision timing of each data sample. The SCUBA-2 data handing and OCS communications are broken into two tasks, one doing the actual data acquisition and file writing, the other communicates with the OCS through Drama. These two tasks talk to each other via shared memory and semaphores. It is possible to swap back and forth between heterodyne and SCUBA-2 observing simply by selecting an observation for a particular instrument. This paper also covers the changes made to the existing OCS in order to integrate it with the new SCUBA-2 specific software.
© (2010) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Craig A. Walther, Xiaofeng Gao, Dennis Kelly, Russell D. Kackley, and Tim Jenness "Integration of SCUBA-2 within the JCMT Observatory Control System", Proc. SPIE 7740, Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy, 77400Y (19 July 2010); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.857879
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KEYWORDS
Computing systems

Control systems

Data acquisition

Observatories

Telescopes

Data archive systems

Astronomy

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