Last Updated on Thursday, July 26, 2001 at 13:29:05. by Author: Pradeep Sarin

Mercury General Information/Help

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• Mercury system description
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Mercury system description

The VME Crate containing the Mercury System Boards is located in the Electronics Room at the top of  Rack 5:

When the crate is reset, (either by cycling the power or by pressing the RST button on the left-most, crate-controller module), the Mercury proccessors boot-up and automatically load the programs necessary for DAQ operations. The Mercury crate is connected by a point-to-point network connection to the Event-builder (phobosx) computer which provides a local IP address and name (silicon)  for the crate. So the crate is 'visible' only from phobosx computer - you can do a password-less login from phobosx using 'telnet silicon'. After a normal boot-up sequence, you should be able to login to the crate-controller and the Mercury  DAQ programs should be printing a message 'Waiting for Registration with PhatDAQ..' From there follow normal DAQ procedures.

For those interested, the (heavily documented!) code that runs on the Mercury system is placed under CVS and is accessible at :
http://www.rhic.bnl.gov/~phobos/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/MercuryZSS. Currently the Mercury and VxWorks cross-compilers needed to compile this code and make it run on the Mercury processors are setup on phobosun.chm.bnl.gov (login:phobos). The produced targets need to be placed in mercury@phobosx.chm.bnl.gov:~/zss as this is the default directory the Mercury Crate looks into on boot-up to download the programs. The Makefiles take care of this transferring, so to do a fresh build, all you need to do is :

• login as phobos@phobosun.chm.bnl.gov
• do 'cvs get MercuryZSS' after releasing any previously held copies of MercuryZSS
• do 'make'

This should compile the programs needed and place them in mercury@phobosx.chm.bnl.gov:~/zss