Application of HDF5 in long-pulse quasi-steady state data acquisition at high sampling rate

•The new data-acquisition system supports long-pulse EAST data acquisition.•The new data-acquisition system is capable for most of the high frequency signals of EAST experiments.•The system's total throughput is about 500 MB/s.•The system uses HDF5 to store data.

A new high sampling rate quasi-steady state data-acquisition system has been designed for the microwave reflectometry diagnostic of EAST experiments. In order to meet the requirements of long-pulse discharge and high sampling rate, it is designed based on PXI Express technology. A high-performance digitizer National Instruments PXIe-5122 with two synchronous analog input channels in which the maximum sampling rate is 100 MHz has been adopted. Two PXIe-5122 boards at 60 MSPS and one PXIe-6368 board at 2 MSPS are used in the system and the total throughput is about 500 MB/s. To guarantee the large amounts of data being saved continuously in the long-pulse discharge, an external hard-disk data stream enclosure NI HDD-8265 in which the capacity of sustained speed of reading and writing is 700 MB/s. And in RAID-5 mode its storage capacity is 80% of the total.The obtained raw data firstly stream continuously into NI HDD-8265 during the discharge. Then it will be transferred to the data server automatically and converted into HDF5 file format. HDF5 is an open source file format for data storage and management which has been widely used in various fields, and suitable for long term case. The details of the system are described in the paper.