The Data Acquisition Group is part of the Science Division within the structure of the Diamond Light Source. The group provides computing support for scientists in the collection and analysis of data from all beamlines, and as such, perform a key role in the research emerging from Diamond.
Key responsibilities include:
- The control of experimental equipment used to establish the environment of the sample.
- The control and reading of data from the X-Ray Data Detector used on the beamlines.
- The administration of experimental parameters and electronic logs.
- How data are stored and the implementation of analysis and visualization software.
- The administration and organization of experimental computing facilities.
OpenGDA - Software for Science
The data acquisition team are also responsible for the OpenGDA project - an open-source framework for creating customised data acquisition software for science facilities such as neutron and x-ray sources. The software is Java/Eclipse-based, free and released under the GPLv3.
It is based on the Generic Data Acquisition (GDA) software developed at Diamond Light Source. The GDA was initially developed at SRS Daresbury but since 2003 it has been adopted by Diamond Light Source who took over as the principal developer. The team at Diamond have developed the GDA for the majority of Diamond beamlines across all the scientific techniques at Diamond.
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