Of paramount importance in a well-diagnosed basic physics experiment is a state of the art data acquisition system. The LAPD laboratory has assembled hardware and software which enables the real-time analysis of experimental data and the storage and manipulation of very large data sets.

The system is flexible enough to perform real-time manipulations of incoming data, and provide rapid turnaround for data reduction and display. The front end of the system consists of a PC-based Labview data acquisition system with interfaces to VXI and GPIB systems which control analog to digital converters, programmable amplifiers, stepping motor controllers, arbitrary waveform generators, and so on. This system is, in turn, networked to four Alphastations, three DECstations, a Sun Ultra-2, a Silicon Graphics Indigo-2 and SGI Octane. Most of these computers have hardware which can render three-dimensional images of data and rotate and zoom in real time. This capability is indispensable for visualizing the complex data sets which are generated from the experiments conducted in the LAPD. The workstations have up to 1 Gbyte of RAM and the local lab hard disk space exceeds 200 GB with high-speed network access to Terabytes of archival tape storage on the main campus. They run the latest in visualization software (AVS, PV-Wave, Maya, etc.) This is supplemented with a number of data analysis and data acquisition programs written in house.

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