Over the past several months CFHT has examined the current data acquisition environment and the current and potential new requirements in this area. As a result of these efforts CFHT has established a GenX working group whose charge is to produce a conceptual approach for a new data acquisition environment which (among other things):

• integrates the Telescope Control System (TCS) and the data acquisition system
• maintains the strengths of the current Pegasus system, which includes (amongst others) a Graphical User Interface, ability to run anywhere on the CFHT network and tools to assess data quality (e.g. image quality)
• address the weaknesses of the current system such as efficiency, complexity to maintain, limited tools to address data quality and the lack of a command line interface.
The working group (chaired by Dennis Crabtree) will be investigating using S/W from other Observatories (see CFHT12k article on page 26 as an example), using a public or commercial S/W package for the GUI rather than the Pegasus system which CFHT must maintain, integrating IRAF into the observing environment to provide a wide range of tools for assessing data quality and adopting an architecture which is is flexible and has the goal of maximizing overall observing efficiency.