# Earthworm Modules:
Q2ew Overview

(last revised November 21, 2006)

q2ew is a Quanterra/COMSERV data feeding program for Earthworm. The utility was written for the Alaska Tsunami Warning Center's Quanterra Q730 digitizers, but should work with any Quanterra digitizer that is COMSERV compatible. COMSERV is a software freeware product developed by Quanterra and other Quanterra users. It is a middleware software layer between the digitizer and the data acquisition software (clients). In short, COMSERV insulates the developer/user from changes to the QSL communications protocol and acts as a multithreaded switch for client processes to access data from the digitizers.

COMSERV must be configured on the same host as the Earthworm system in order for this program to work. Berkeley is the ftp repository for the COMSERV software. Please refer to the COMSERV documentation on how to correctly install and configure this system.

q2ew is designed as a multi-threaded program. The main thread loops polling the COMSERV shared memory region, using COMSERV cs_scan() calls, for new packets arriving from digitizers. Once data arrives, the main thread converts the data into an earthworm trace buffer and ships the data off to the earthworm transport ring. The second thread, the heartbeat, checks that data are coming in from COMSERV in the main thread and issues regular heartbeats. Should there be a fatal problem with the COMSERV server for any of the stations, the heartbeat thread detects this and a message is sent to statmgr and the process dies. The cs_status() call is a critical one to adjust to fine tune the program to modify the severity of reactions to problems/changes observed with COMSERV. All of the fatal errors will cause q2ew to die, but some of the recoverable errors are now set to cause q2ew to die (in particular CSCR_DIED). As we gain more experience with the robustness of COMSERV, we can adjust the recoverable errors to simply provide status messages, but for now lets play it cautious.

The program q2ew has been tested on Solaris and Linux platforms.

Module Index | q2ew Commands