Ron Fox - National Superconducting Cyclotron

NSCL Duties:

My name is Ron Fox, I'm a senior physicist at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory at Michigan State University (NSCL). My main focus at NSCL is to develop and support data acquisition systems for both the laboratory as a whole and for specific experiments with special requirements. Lately I've also been maintaining and extending the NSCL intranet applications.

Interests and current work:

• Computing - as you might expect from my job. I'm interested primarily in the development and deployment of soft-real-time applications. If you want to see more information about the computer group at the NSCL, and look at computer documentation, and you are inside the NSCL, you can look at the computer group home page
• Data acquisition.  The NSCL data acquisition system for the coupled cyclotron is one of my big development projects.  Documentation on what we have so far is here
• We have produced a framework for event hanlding in a threaded environment such as the NSCL data acquisition system.  We provide transparent serialization so that the application developer believes that they are running in a pure event driven environment.  Doxygen documentation pages here.
• Data analysis tools: I'm writing a data analysis tool called SpecTcl which is an object oriented data analysis system that embeds the Tcl/TK scripting language. Documentation for the current release is here
• In progress is the production event readout software framework for the NSCL data acquisition system;   Functional requirements are (msword) here. The conceptual design is here (rtf).  Doxygen documentation (prelminary) is here
• Publication list
• Online talks.
• A snapshot of the doxygen for spectrodaq is: here
• Finally, I practice Kendo which is a Japanese martial art of swordsmanship (fencing). I teach kendo at the MSU Kendo club I also teach an MSU introductory class on kendo as part of the Kinesiology 102, Introduction to combative sports class.

Click here to see where I am on my set of work items for the next Data Acquisition system development iteration.
Click here to see what I'm up to today.