What is CODA used for ?

CODA is a data acquisition system designed for nuclear physics experiments at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, colloquially known as Jefferson lab. The laboratories web site is http://www.jlab.org/.
CODA is a tool kit composed of software and hardware from which a data acquisition system can be built which will manage the acquisition, monitoring and storage of data from a Nuclear Physics experiment.
The CODA system is designed to be modular and scalable. Data is transported between processors using commercial network hardware, Ethernet, FDDI and ATM, with standard network protocols (TCP/IP).
A typical CODA system consists of one or more embedded "readout controllers" known as ROCs running the VxWorks real-time kernel, communicating with one or more UNIX systems. Currently Solaris and Linux sources and binaries for CODA are available from the data acquisition group at Jefferson Lab. A short description of CODA can be found in this page.

How did CODA evolve?

The data acquisition group was formed in the late 1980's as the construction of the laboratory was beginning. The goal was to provide a uniform data acquisition system for the three main experiments. The mission of the data acquisition group is stated in the Mission page.
CODA began with evaluations of data acquisition hardware and software available in 1989-1991 to determine which course of action would lead to a design which would be able to run the experiments. These tests lead to the development of CODA 1 which was used during detector development and for early runs of the first experiments in experiment halls A and C. While CODA 1 was being used and evolving as bugs ere discovered and fixed CODA 2 was designed based on experience running CODA 1. CODA 2 was designed to have the highest possible performance in terms of data throughput based on technology available and was intended to be highly modular so that individual modules could evolve to meet future needs.
The Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) began data taking in the first hall, Hall C, on July 24th 1994. Hall A took some preliminary data early in 1996. Both of these halls started data taking with version 1.3 of CODA. The last, and most ambitious data acquisition system, Hall B, started in fall 1996 and has used version 2 of CODA from day one. By the end of 1998 all three major experiments, plus parasitic experiments such as Rad-Phi, were using the same version ( 2.1 ) of CODA.
The Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility was renamed "The Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility" or "Jefferson Lab" in 1996 to mark the end of the construction phase of the facility. CODA had already gained enough recognition in the data acquisition community that the name CODA was retained.
For any readers who are interested a more detailed history is to be found on the History page.

Is CODA for Jefferson lab only?

Through the years various versions of CODA have been used by several other research facilities and Universities for uses ranging from detector testing to full scale in-beam experiments. Also since CODA was designed to be modular some parts of CODA have been used by other groups. A good example is the event transport or ET system which was developed for use with CODA and is used by Brookhaven.