Management of EPICS IOCs in a Distributed Network Environment Using Salt

An EPICS-based control system typically consists of many individual IOCs, which can be distributed across many computers in a network. Managing hundreds of deployed IOCs, keeping track of where they are running, and providing operators with basic interaction capabilities can easily become a maintenance nightmare. At the Institute for Beam Physics and Technology (IBPT) of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), we operate separate networks for our accelerators KARA and FLUTE and use the Salt Project to manage the IT infrastructure. Custom Salt states take care of deploying our IOCs across multiple servers directly from the code repositories, integrating them into the host operating system and monitoring infrastructure. In addition, this allows the integration into our GUI in order to enable operators to monitor and control the process for each IOC without requiring any specific knowledge of where and how that IOC is deployed. Therefore, we can maintain and scale to any number of IOCs on any numbers of hosts nearly effortless. This paper presents the design of this system, discusses the tools and overall setup required to make it work, and shows off the integration into our GUI and monitoring systems

Systematic Beam Parameter Studies at the Injector Section of FLUTE

FLUTE (Ferninfrarot Linac- und Test-Experiment) is a compact linac-based test facility for accelerator R&D and source of intense THz radiation for photon science. In preparation for the next experiments, the electron beam of the injector section of FLUTE has been characterized. In systematic studies the electron beam parameters, e.g., beam energy and emittance, are measured with several diagnostic systems. This knowledge allows the establishment of different operation settings and the optimization of electron beam parameters for future experiments

Integrating Control Applications into Different Control Systems

Porting complex device servers from one control system to another is often a major effort due to the strong code coupling of the business logic to control system data structures. Together with its partners from the Helmholtz Association and from industry, DESY is developing a control system adapter. It allows to write applications in a control system independent way, while still being able to update the process variables and react on control system triggers. We report on the status of the project and the experience we gained trying to write portable device servers

Integrating Real-Time Control Applications into Different Control Systems

Porting complex device servers from one control system to another is often amajor effort due to the strong code coupling of the business logic to control system data structures.Together with its partners from the Helmholtz Association and from industry,DESY is developing a control system adapter as part of the MTCA4U tool kit.It allows to writeapplications in a control system independent way, while still being able toupdate the process variables and react on control system triggers.Special attention has been paid to make the implementation thread safe andreal time capable, while still providing the required abstraction and avoidingperformance losses.We report on the status of the project and the plans to implement new features

Drivers and Software for MicroTCA.4

The MicroTCA.4 crate standard provides a powerful electronic platform for digital and analogue signal processing.Besides excellent hardware modularity, it is the software reliability and flexibility as well as the easy integration into existing Software infrastructures that will drive the widespread adoption of the new standard. The DESY MicroTCA.4 User Tool Kit (MTCA4U) comprises three main components: A Linux device driver, a C++ API for accessing the MicroTCA. 4 devices and a control system interface layer. Themain focus of the tool kit is flexibility to enable fast development. The universal, expandable PCIexpress driver and a register mapping library allow out of the box Operation of all MicroTCA.4 devices which carry firmware developed with the DESY FPGA board support package. The controlsystem adapter provides callback functions to decouple the application code from the middleware layer. Like this the same business logic can be used at different facilities without further modification

ChimeraTK: A Toolkit for Modular Control Applications

The DESY ChimeraTK (formerly called MTCA4U) is a collection of C++ libraries which facilitate the development of control applications. Special importance has been placed on abstraction from communication layers to simplify writing applications in heterogenous environments or reusing applications in a different facility. Access to hardware is realised with the deviceaccess library through an extensible register-based interface. Starting from PCI Express (e.g. used inside MicroTCA.4 crates) a growing number of backends allow to communicate also through network protocols and even access other control applications. Features like register name mapping and automatic type conversion make the software robust against firmware and hardware changes. The control system adapter allows to write applications which can be used in different SCADA systems such as DOOCS, EPICS or OPC-UA with little to no changes in the source code. We give an update on status of the toolkit and present new features which have recently been implemented or are currently being developed

ChimeraTK - A Software Tool Kit for Control Applications

The presentation provides an overview of the ChimeraTK framework. The project started from a demand for software libraries that provide convenient access to PCIE bus based cards on the MicroTCA.4 platform. Previously called MTCA4U, ChimeraTK is evolving towards a set of frameworks and tools that enable users to build up control applications, while abstracting away specifics of the underlying system. Initially, the focus of the project was the DeviceAccess C++ library and its bindings for Matlab and Python, along with a Qt based client that used DeviceAccess under the hood. However, ChimeraTK has expanded to include more tools like the ControlSystemAdapter, VirtualLab and ApplicationCore. The ControlSystemAdapter framework focuses on tools that enable application code to be written in a middle ware agnostic manner. VirtualLab focuses on facilitating testing of application code and providing functional mocks. The ApplicationCore library aims at unifying application interfaces to other tools in the toolkit and improving abstraction. We present an update on improvements to the project and discuss motivations and applications for these new set of tools introduced into the toolkit

Abstracted Hardware and Middleware Access in Control Applications

Hardware access often brings implementation details into a control application, which are subsequently published to the control system. Experience at DESY has shown that it is beneficial for the software quality to use a high level of abstraction from the beginning of a project. Some hardware registers for instance can immediately be treated as process variables if an appropriate library is taking care of most of the error handling. Other parts of the hardware need an additional layer to match the abstraction level of the application. Like this development cycles can be shortened and the code is easier to read and maintain because the logic focuses on what is done, not how it is done. We present the abstraction concept we are using, which is not only unifying the access to hardware but also how process variables are published via the control system middleware

Commissioning Status of FLUTE

FLUTE (Ferninfrarot Linac- Und Test-Experiment) will be a new compact versatile linear accelerator at the KIT. Its primary goal is to serve as a platform for a variety of accelerator studies as well as to generate strong ultra-short THz pulses for photon science. The phase I of the project, which includes the RF photo injector providing electrons at beam energy of 7 MeV and a corresponding diagnostics section, is currently being commissioned. In this contribution, we report on the latest progress of the commissioning phase. The status of the gun conditioning will be given, followed by an overview of the RF system and the laser system