New developments of the EAST data system

As the discharge time becomes longer, the old EAST data system will not meet the requirements of EAST discharge experiment gradually. The problems mainly focus on continuous data acquisition and real-time data access. To meet the requirements of EAST 1000s discharges, the data acquisition mode, data storage structure and data access interface must be improved or reconstructed. Time slice mechanism is one of the popular solutions for continuous data acquisition and real-time data transfer. Data access of large signal files has been successfully solved via a hierarchical storage management system. Moreover, conventional remote indexing is replaced with local indexing in data access, which greatly enhanced data access speed. These improvements have been implemented and applied to EAST long-pulse plasma experiments which are described in this paper in detail. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.