A Workstation-Based Incoherent Scatter Radar Data Acquisition System J
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by HAL-INSU MIDAS-W: a workstation-based incoherent scatter radar data acquisition system J. M. Holt, P. J. Erickson, A. M. Gorczyca, T. Grydeland To cite this version: J. M. Holt, P. J. Erickson, A. M. Gorczyca, T. Grydeland. MIDAS-W: a workstation-based incoherent scatter radar data acquisition system. Annales Geophysicae, European Geosciences Union, 2000, 18 (9), pp.1231-1241. <hal-00316793> HAL Id: hal-00316793 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00316793 Submitted on 1 Jan 2000 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destin´eeau d´ep^otet `ala diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publi´esou non, lished or not. The documents may come from ´emanant des ´etablissements d'enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche fran¸caisou ´etrangers,des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou priv´es. Ann. Geophysicae 18, 1231±1241 /2000) Ó EGS ± Springer-Verlag 2000 MIDAS-W: a workstation-based incoherent scatter radar data acquisition system J. M. Holt1, P. J. Erickson1, A. M. Gorczyca1, T. Grydeland2 1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Haystack Observatory, Westford, MA 01886, USA 2 University of Tromsù, Tromsù, Norway Received: 28 December 1999 / Revised: 19 June 2000 / Accepted: 21 June 2000 Abstract. The Millstone Hill Incoherent Scatter Data simpli®ed, because a workstation with the new software Acquisition System /MIDAS) is based on an abstract can be added to the network without impacting the model of an incoherent scatter radar. This model is production system. MIDAS-W has been operated in implemented in a hierarchical software system, which parallel with the existing MIDAS-1 system to verify that serves to isolate hardware and low-level software incoherent scatter measurements by the two systems implementation details from higher levels of the system. agree. MIDAS-W has also been used in a high- Inherent in this is the idea that implementation details bandwidth mode to collect data on the November, can easily be changed in response to technological 1999, Leonid meteor shower. advances. MIDAS is an evolutionary system, and the MIDAS hardware has, in fact, evolved while the basic software model has remained unchanged. From the Key words: Electromagnetics /instruments and earliest days of MIDAS, it was realized that some techniques; signal processing and adaptive antennas) ± functions implemented in specialized hardware might Ionosphere /instruments and techniques) eventually be implemented by software in a general- purpose computer. MIDAS-W is the realization of this concept. The core component of MIDAS-W is a Sun Microsystems UltraSparc 10 workstation equipped with 1 Introduction an Ultrarad 1280 PCI bus analog to digital /A/D) converter board. In the current implementation, a The Millstone Incoherent Scatter Data Acquisition 2.25 MHz intermediate frequency /IF) is bandpass System /MIDAS) is based on an abstract model of a sampled at 1 ls intervals and these samples are multi- general incoherent scatter radar. This model is imple- cast over a high-speed Ethernet which serves as a raw mented in a hierarchal software system which serves both data bus. A second workstation receives the samples, to isolate dierent levels of the software from each other, converts them to ®ltered, decimated, complex baseband and to hide hardware implementation details from samples and computes the lag-pro®le matrix of the higher levels of the system. Inherent in this is the idea decimated samples. Overall performance is approxi- that portions of the software and hardware can easily be mately ten times better than the previous MIDAS changed in response to technological advances, and the system, which utilizes a custom digital ®ltering module MIDAS software and hardware has, in fact, evolved and array processor based correlator. A major advan- while the basic software model has remained unchanged. tage of MIDAS-W is its ¯exibility. A portable, single- MIDAS-1, the production system at Millstone, has workstation data acquisition system can be implemented undergone numerous changes since it became operation- by moving the software receiver and correlator pro- al in 1992, and MIDAS-C, which was built for bistatic grams to the workstation with the A/D converter. When observations using the Algonquin Observatory antenna the data samples are multicast, additional data process- in Canada, included further signi®cant upgrades. ing systems, for example for raw data recording, can be However, the digital signal processing sections of implemented simply by adding another workstation MIDAS-1 and MIDAS-C, which compute lag pro®les with suitable software to the high-speed network. /Lehtinen, 1986; Holt et al., 1992) from digitized sam- Testing of new data processing software is also greatly ples, have remained largely unchanged. The received incoherent scatter signal is converted to a low interme- diate frequency /IF), which is two or four times the ®nal Correspondence to: J. M. Holt complex sampling rate. This low IF is digitized by a e-mail: [email protected] custom analog to digital /A/D) module, and then ®ltered 1232 J. M. Holt et al.: MIDAS-W: a workstation-based incoherent scatter radar data acquisition system and converted to baseband complex samples by a peak power during an integration period, the structure custom DSP module. The only major dierence between can be used as a radar status speci®cation. If properly MIDAS-1 and MIDAS-C is that MIDAS-C uses a implemented, the data structure approach also provides newer, faster array processor. several other advantages. A distributed data acquisition From the beginning, it was realized that many system can be implemented by sending the structure to MIDAS signal processing functions could eventually the various processors and processes which control the be implemented in software. MIDAS-W is the realiza- radar. And, if the structures are implemented in a tion of this concept. The digital processing ``section'' of machine-independent fashion, the resulting structure MIDAS-W consists of a commercial A/D board in a can be interpreted and processed by any computer, Unix Workstation, along with several additional work- eliminating the common problem of having to convert a stations which communicate with each other over a data tape to the format of a computer other than that on dedicated high-speed local area network /LAN). The which the data were collected. In MIDAS, these goals A/D board samples an IF at a ®xed rate, and these have been achieved by implementing the structures in samples are retransmitted in digital form on the LAN. External Data Representation /XDR) language. XDR With appropriate software, any computer on the was developed by Sun Microsystems and is the basis of network becomes a receiver. All functions handled by their Network File System /NFS), which is a de facto DSP hardware in MIDAS-1, such as ®ltering, decima- standard in the computer industry. The software tion and correlation are carried out in software on one libraries needed to implement XDR are available on or more of the workstations. Additional functions, such all modern computers, and are in the public domain, as storing or displaying the raw samples, can also be making it easy to port the system to new processors if easily implemented in software. necessary. This public domain software also makes it Digital receivers which sample an intermediate fre- easy to de®ne remote procedure calls /RPC), which quency and process this signal in programmable digital allow the structures to be passed back and forth between hardware are now very common. For example, this separate processes, between separate closely coupled technique is used in cellular phones where costly and processors, between computers on a local network, and bulky analog hardware must be minimized, and where between computers which can communicate via the multiple standards /for example, TDMA, GSM and Internet or serial communications lines. CDMA) favor systems which can be adapted to dierent The structure contains three parts. First there is a standards through software changes. MIDAS-W diers header containing basic information such as the site ID. from most digital receivers in two respects. First, all Like the other parts of the structure, the header includes processing is carried out in general-purpose computers a variable length character string which could contain rather than specialized digital signal processing /DSP) notes, log excerpts, source-code or any other desired hardware. Second, the digitized signal is rebroadcast on information. The second part of the structure is the a LAN for processing by as many computers as needed integration period speci®cation. This contains all infor- by a particular application. This provides a high degree mation required by the radar to execute the integration of ¯exibility, which is ideally suited to a research period, such as antenna pointing commands, timing environment such as an incoherent scatter radar. Unit information, waveforms etc. The third part of the engineering costs, which are very high for low-volume speci®cation contains the integration period data, such systems, are also greatly reduced. The system is also as actual antenna pointing directions, transmitted pow- very easy to upgrade, simply by changing workstations er, and the measured lag-pro®les. or the network as newer, faster hardware becomes The structures are actually encoded in RPC language. available. This is a superset of XDR language which de®nes the structure itself. The full RPC language includes addi- tional features needed to de®ne the remote procedure 2 MIDAS software architecture calls used to transfer the structures between processes. XDR structures are also continuous data streams, The core of the MIDAS software system is an abstract unlike C language recursive structures which are spread model of a general incoherent scatter radar.