Chapter 30. Experiment Configuration utility
The experiment configuration utility works together with the statemanager and boot programs to allow you to define the software and data flow elements for your experiment. For information about the state manager see The state manager. For information about the boot managerr see The Boot utility
The experiment configuration utility is a graphical editor. The editor lets you configure:
The set of nodes (computers) your experiment runs on
The ring buffers your experiment uses for dataflow and which nodes they liveo n.
A set of critical programs and the nodes on which they will be started. In the context of the boot manager, a critical program is one that must continue to run for the experiment to work. In the context of the state manager, if a critical program exits, a FAIL transition is requested to make the system state NotReady
The remainder of this chapter will describe how to:
Open or create an experiment configuration.
Work with the node configuration of the experiment.
Work with the ring configuration of the experiment.
Work with the program configuration of the experiment.
30.1. Starting the program and choosing a configuration
Before starting the experiment configurationprogram, NSCLDAQ installation specific environment variables must be defined. This is done by sourcing the dasetup.bash script from the root of the installation directory for your DAQ distribution.
If, for example, NSCLDAQ is installed in /usr/opt/daq/11.0:
makes the necessary environment variable definitions.
Once the daqsetup.bash script has been run, you can start up the experiment configuration tool via the command:
The editor looks like this immediately after it was started:
The top of the display has the File menu from which you can open existing or create new experiment definition files. Definition files are sqlite3 databases. All editor operations are immediately reflected in the database.