SPIDER is a test facility, under development in Italy to start operation in 2013, to develop and test the full size negative ion source for the ITER heating and diagnostic neutral beam injectors. Its nominal requirements are: ion beam in H- or D- accelerated at 100keV, ion current 40/60A in D-/H-, beam duration 3600s. A set of diagnostics will measure the source and beam parameters, including thermocouples, calorimetry, emission/absorption spectroscopy, electrical, vacuum, radiation, caesium sensors, and electrostatic probes. Operation will be through an integrated control and data acquisition system structured into three independent tiers (control, interlock, safety) and three hierarchical levels (Central, Subsystems, Plant System Units) requiring 10MHz synchronous clock distribution, slow/fast control cycle times down to 10ms/100us, acquisition of 1000 analogue channels / 70 images with sampling rates up to 100MHz / 50-100Hz, data throughput <110MByte/s, data storage volume <400GByte/pulse and <10-100TByte/year. The paper presents the requirements and the design of the control and data acquisition system, illustrating in details the design criteria and technological choices.