Sudbury neutrino observatory neutral current detector acquisition software overview

The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory begins a new phase of operation in the autumn of 2003 with the installation of the neutral current detectors (NCDs). This paper focuses mainly on the object-oriented real-time control and acquisition (ORCA) software that is the framework for the data acquisition system of the NCD array. Particular emphasis is given to the general purpose nature of ORCA and the manner in which it provides generic object-oriented software modules that can be configured and connected together at run-time to build general-purpose data acquisition applications. ORCA is the main graphical user interface for the NCD experiment and is used for hardware initialization, run control, data readout, and data shipping.