Steve Jenkins

Because of the distributed nature of our data acquisition systems (our primary DAS consists of a QNX system, an SGI, two NT-PCs running LabVIEW, and several other NT-PCs) a centralized method of event handling is required.

The system is made up of three sections: event generation, event handling and recording, and event filtering and viewing.

The event generation section consists of both programmatic and interactive event generators. In order to accommodate the various programs and platforms, subroutines to programmatically generate events and connect to the server have been written in Perl, C and LabVIEW (these and a few JavaScript routines are the only non-Perl portions of the system). The interactive event generator is a CGI script that presents a simple web page form to the user. This is required in order to manually create software events that correspond to physical changes in the experiment that cannot be measured by the DAS.

The event handling and recording section is a simple server script that listens for incoming messages and writes them to log files. It is also capable of notifying users by email of specific events.

The event filtering and viewing section is another CGI script that allows the user to apply filtering criteria such as time, event source, and a regular expression search on the log files to extract events of interest and have them displayed as an HTML table or downloaded for use in spreadsheet programs.

The paper and the associated code would be made available in HTML.