MIDAS

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The Multi-Input Data Acquisition System (MIDAS) is a software package designed to acquire external data, process and format the data, and output the data to other software systems. Data is received by hardware I/O devices, such as PCI interface cards. These devices include, but are not limited to, analog-to-digital converter boards, parallel and serial digital data capture devices, and network interfaces. Once acquired, the data is formatted or “gathered” by gather processes. MIDAS sends this gathered data to other software systems for additional processing. Currently, it supports both a shared-memory inter-process communication (IPC) method, as well as Adaptive Methods’ Generic Middle-Layer (GML) interprocess communication.

The MIDAS software can grow to accommodate new input devices and gather modules. Often however, by changing parameters the software can leverage its existing capability to suit new applications. Most of the input modules and some of the gather modules are generic and can be applied to suit many different tasks.

MIDAS is highly multithreaded and thus is capable of handling several input, gather, and output processes simultaneously. Processes can run completely independent of one another (for example, two disparate acquisition systems), or communicate between each other for increased acquisition capacity or parallel processing.

MIDAS was developed to run on both Windows and Linux platforms.