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MDSplus can either be installed using one of the provided binary kits (recommended) or built from the sources on your computer.

If you want to install the Globus enabled kits then you also need to install the Globus libraries compatible with these kits. For additional instruction on installing the Globus enabled kits you should visit the PPPL TRANSP pages which have been created as part of the National Fusion Collaboratory project.

The MDSplus user community has also developed some MDSplus extensions which may be generally useful to other MDSplus users. As the number of these extensions grow we hope to provide a mechanism for users to advertise their packages and provide instructions for downloading, installing and using them. For now we will add url links on the "Shared Apps" page. If you have an application, utility, language interface or any other useful tool that you would like to share with the MDSplus user community and can provide a url to your tool please send an email to [webmaster@mdsplus.org| webmaster@mdsplus.org]. MDSplus packages are available for a number of computing platforms. Additional platforms can usually be supported by downloading the MDSplus sources and building directly on the computer where you want to run MDSplus.

Installing Binary Kits

Binary kits are provided for a variety of linux distributions, windows, and macintosh. Directions and download links are provided on the Software Downloads page. For the linux platform we have included OpenMotif kits which the MDSplus Motif applications are linked against. You may need to use the --force option of rpm to install the OpenMotif kit if you already have another OpenMotif kit installed.

Building from sources

The MDSplus source code is maintained on github. It can either be cloned, downloaded as zip or tar.gz file. Details are provided on the Building from Sources page.

Performance Considerations

For best performance, the tree files (*.tree, *.datafile, *.characteristics) should be stored on a local file system. And this is particularly true when using MDSplus for data acquisition. (And also when building / running the MDSplus --test suite.) MDSplus uses many file locks, and thus the fastest response is with local files.

If the tree files are stored on a NFS volume, performance will be degraded because locking on a shared NFS volume adds overhead. In particular, multi-threaded code that writes simultaneously to many segmented signals can degrade significantly when the tree files are on NFS.