GDA goes open source

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 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 for the latest information but we list below briefly some of the features of the software:

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 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 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 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 team