GSE XOP About the GSE

About The GSE

The user interface is designed for realtime data presentation

The XRS GSE is designed for use in testing and improving the XRS instrument. As such, it must display data quickly, keeping the user informed of the state of the instrument.

Igor is intended as a scientific graphing application, not a realtime status display engine. However, it can be coerced into making quite useful displays of realtime status, at the cost of processor cycles. Most of the performance hit (especially on a PowerBook) is in drawing the realtime display, which means that the GSE can be sped up simply by closing unneeded status windows.

Find out more about the user interface.

Performance is important, especially on a PowerBook

Even though XRS is considered a low-bandwidth instrument by modern satellite standards (10kbps maximum), displaying all its data in realtime requires some relatively serious processing power. We generally run it on an 8500/120 or a PowerBook 5300ce. The 5300 can just barely keep up with the XRS when it is producing data from a bright X-ray source (lots of photons).

Some of the things we did to improve performance.

Igor has some disadvantages for this kind of work

The biggest issue with the system is memory use. Because the data all goes into Igor waves, it must all stay in memory at one time. This limits us to about 40MB of data on the PowerBook (which has the maximum 64MB of RAM installed).

One option that would help here is to stream the data to FIFOs instead. In Igor, the FIFO (First-In-First-Out) is a structure that the XOP could write to which Igor automatically writes to disk, keeping only the latest portion in memory. That would allow us to collect data limited only by disk space. Implementing such a scheme would be a lot of work, however, particularly for analyzing the data.

TCP communication

The data comes in via TCP. This allows great flexibility in locating the GSE with respect to the instrument hardware.

Find out more about the TCP interface.

The user interface is designed for realtime data presentation	The XRS GSE is designed for use in testing and improving the XRS instrument. As such, it must display data quickly, keeping the user informed of the state of the instrument. Igor is intended as a scientific graphing application, not a realtime status display engine. However, it can be coerced into making quite useful displays of realtime status, at the cost of processor cycles. Most of the performance hit (especially on a PowerBook) is in drawing the realtime display, which means that the GSE can be sped up simply by closing unneeded status windows. Find out more about the user interface.
Performance is important, especially on a PowerBook	Even though XRS is considered a low-bandwidth instrument by modern satellite standards (10kbps maximum), displaying all its data in realtime requires some relatively serious processing power. We generally run it on an 8500/120 or a PowerBook 5300ce. The 5300 can just barely keep up with the XRS when it is producing data from a bright X-ray source (lots of photons). Some of the things we did to improve performance.
Igor has some disadvantages for this kind of work	The biggest issue with the system is memory use. Because the data all goes into Igor waves, it must all stay in memory at one time. This limits us to about 40MB of data on the PowerBook (which has the maximum 64MB of RAM installed). One option that would help here is to stream the data to FIFOs instead. In Igor, the FIFO (First-In-First-Out) is a structure that the XOP could write to which Igor automatically writes to disk, keeping only the latest portion in memory. That would allow us to collect data limited only by disk space. Implementing such a scheme would be a lot of work, however, particularly for analyzing the data.
TCP communication	The data comes in via TCP. This allows great flexibility in locating the GSE with respect to the instrument hardware. Find out more about the TCP interface.