Development of a distributed high-speed data acquisition and monitoring system based on a special data packet format for HUST RF negative ion source

A distributed high-speed data acquisition and monitoring system for the RF negative ion source at Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) is developed, which consists of data acquisition, data forwarding and data processing. Firstly, the data acquisition modules sample physical signals at high speed and upload the sampling data with corresponding absolute-time labels over UDP, which builds the time correlation among different signals. And a special data packet format is proposed for the data upload, which is convenient for packing or parsing a fixed-length packet, especially when the span of the time labels in a packet crosses an absolute second. The data forwarding modules then receive the UDP messages and distribute their data packets to the real-time display module and the data storage modules by PUB/SUB-pattern message queue of ZeroMQ. As for the data storage, a scheme combining the file server and MySQL database is adopted to increase the storage rate and facilitate the data query. The test results show that the loss rate of the data packets is within the range of 0–5% and the storage rate is higher than 20 Mbps, both acceptable for the HUST RF negative ion source.