[Insight-users] FW: GDA goes Open Source - scientific data acquisition / hardware control system

[Robert.Atwood at diamond.ac.uk]

Hello fellow ITK users:

I hope the follwing announement from my colleagues here at Diamond
Synchrotron is of some interest; our  Data Acquisition team has plans to
include volume visualization, and I'd like to create some hook for
calling ITK-based analysis routines .. But also I know several people
here are generally following the use of open-source in science. 

I'm not a developer on the GDA project, merely a user. After some
initial teething pains it seems actually not bad for users , our very
first external users were able, during their three-day visit, to run
unattended automated experiments.  

Robert Atwood
Beamline I-12 (Joint Environmental, Engineering and Processing )
Diamond Light Source 


(begin forwarded message) 

"GDA goes open source"

www.opengda.org 

 
It is with great pleasure that we announce the making of our core Data
Acquisition framework "Open Source". The GDA project is an open-source
framework for creating customized data acquisition software for science
facilities such as neutron and x-ray <http://www.lightsources.org/>
sources. It includes in addition some complementary pre-release analysis
and visualization software from the analysis team.

We hope that this may be of use in other facilities and, ideally, that
we may be able to profit from the value that you may contribute. Please
consult the website www.opengda.org <http://www.opengda.org/> for the
latest information but we list below briefly some of the features of the
software:

GDA was initially developed at SRS Daresbury <http://www.srs.ac.uk/>
but since 2003 it has been adopted by Diamond Light Source
<http://diamond.ac.uk/>  who took over as the principal developer.
 
The software is released under the GPLv3. 

*	Eclipse RCP graphical interface (there is a Swing interface
which is being phased out) 
*	Embedded Jython interpreter for scripting and command-line
control 
*	Control system agnostic: internal interfaces in the code enable
the control system(s) that operate individual pieces of hardware to be
abstracted from the rest of the code. 
*	Diffcalc <http://www.opengda.org/OpenGDA/About/Diffcalc.html>
for diffractometer control in reciprical lattice space. 
*	Distributed design: multiple object servers representing
hardware communicating with multiple clients via CORBA 
*	Role-based access control to restrict users operations on
hardware where necessary 
*	Baton control: multiple client GUIs may run at the same time on
each beamline with control managed by a baton passed between them. 
*	Nexus <http://www.nexusformat.org/>  data file format. Other
formats are used and may be implemented, but the code is optimised for
the Nexus format. 
*	Nexus data file viewer within the GDA client. 
*	Online data analysis and visualisation

The Diamond Light Source
Data Acquisition and Scientific Computing teams

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