Fasti - The Global Controller.

Inside Fasti there is a central controller for start-up, general housekeeping, global control of operations data collection, formatting and buffering, and data pre-processing, when needed.

The basic ideas of the proposed design are:

• The system is a Intel or Alpha based standard PC
• It has plenty of built-in or easily available interfaces.
• It is cheaper in money and in work compared to alternate solutions based on custom interface adapters.
• It is seen by the instrument controller computer as a socket in a standard (or fast) Ethernet.
• Can be easily upgraded as computing request increase.
• It has no moving part (such as hard or floppy disk drivers)
• It is programmable, so can accommodate very different tasks.