Software for Data Acquisition AMC Module with PCI Express Interface

Free Electron Laser in Hamburg (FLASH) and XRay Free Electron Laser (XFEL) are linear accelerators that require a complex and accurate Low Level Radio Frequency (LLRF) control system. Currently working systems are based on aged Versa Module Eurocard (VME) architecture. One of the alternatives for the VME bus is the Advanced Telecommunications and Computing Architecture (ATCA) standard. The ATCA based LLRF controller mainly consists of a few ATCA carrier boards and several Advanced Mezzanine Cards (AMC). AMC modules are available in variety of functions such as: ADC, DAC, data storage, data links and even CPU cards. This paper focuses on the software that allows user to collect and plot the data from commercially available TAMC900 board

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Rapid FPGA Development Framework Using a Custom Simulink Library for MTCA.4 Modules

The recent introduction of advanced hardware architectures such as the Micro Telecommunications Computing Architecture (MTCA) caused a change in the approach to implementation of control schemes in many fields. It required the development to move away from traditional programming languages (C/C++) to hardware description languages Verilog), which are used in FPGA development.. With MATLAB/Simulink it is possible to describe complex systems with block diagrams and simulate their behavior. Those diagrams are then used by the HDL experts, to implement exactly the required functionality in hardware. Both the porting of existing applications and adaptation of new ones requires a lot of development time from them. To solve this, Xilinx SystemGenerator, a toolbox for MATLAB/Simulink, allows rapid prototyping of those block diagrams using hardware modelling. It is still up to the firmware developer to merge this structure with the hardware-dependent HDL project. This prevents the application engineer from quickly verifying the proposed schemes in real hardware.The framework described in this article overcomes these challenges, offering a hardware-independent library of components that can be used in Simulink/SystemGenerator models. The components are subsequently translated into VHDL entities and integrated with a pre-prepared VHDL project template. Furthermore, the entire implementation process is run in the background, giving the user a one-click path from control scheme modelling and simulation to bit-file generation.This approach allows the control theory engineers to quickly develop new schemes and test them in real hardware environment. The applications may range from simple data logging or signal generation ones to very advanced controllers. Taking advantage of the Simulink simulation capabilities and user-friendly hardware implementation routines, the framework significantly decreases the development time of FPGA-based applications

Real-time Beam Loading Compensation for Single SRF Cavity LLRF Regulation

Stable and reproducible generation of a photon beam at Free Electron Lasers (FELs) necessitates a low energy spread of the electron beam. A low level radio frequency (LLRF) control system stabilizes the RF field inside accelerating modules. An electron beam passing through the cavity induces a drop in the actual stored field proportional to the charge, the cavity shunt impedance, and the bunch repetition rate. The feedback loop compensates for the perturbation after the accelerating gradient drops. Due to the digital loop delay and limited bandwidth of the closed loop system, this disturbance induces control errors which can increase beam energy spread. An open-loop controller uses information obtained from the beam diagnostic systems accounting in real-time for fluctuations of the beam current. This paper describes the bunch charge detection scheme, its implementation, as well as results of the tests performed on the ELBE (Electron Linac for beams with high Brilliance and low Emittance) radiation source at the HZDR (Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf) facility

FPGA Firmware Framework for MTCA.4 AMC Modules

Many of the modules in specific hardware architectures use the same or similar communication interfaces and IO connectors. MicroTCA (MTCA.4) is one example of such a case. All boards: communicate with the central processing unit (CPU) over PCI Express (PCIe), send data to each other using Multi-Gigabit Transceivers (MGT), use the same backplane resources and have the same Zone3 IO or FPGA mezzanine card (FMC) connectors. All those interfaces are connected and implemented in Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chips. It makes possible to separate the interface logic from the application logic. This structure allows to reuse already done firmware for one application and to create new application on the same module. Also, already developed code can be reused in new boards as a library. Proper structure allows the code to be reused and makes it easy to create new firmware. This paper will present structures of firmware framework and scripting ideas to speed up firmware development for MTCA.4 architecture. European XFEL control systems firmware, which uses the described framework, will be presented as example