Experience with fibre channel in the environment of the ATLAS DAQ protoype "-1" project

Fibre Channel equipment has been evaluated in the environment of the ATLAS DAQ prototype "-1". Fibre Channel PCI and PMC cards have been tested on PwerPC-based VME processor boards running LynxOS and on Pentium-based personal computers running Windows NT. The performance in terms of overhead and bandwidth has been measured in point-to-point, arbitrated loop and fabric configuration with a Fibre Ch annel switch. The possible used of the equipment for event building in the ATLAS DAQ prototype "-1" has been studied

A multigrid strategy for accelerating steady-state computations of waves propagating with curvature dependent speeds

A multigrid strategy is developed for accelerating the steady state computations of waves propagating with curvature dependent speeds. This will allow the rapid computation of a burn table. In a high explosive material, the creation of a burn table will allow the elimination of solving chemical reaction ODEs and feed in source terms to the reactive flow equations for solution of the system of ignition of the high explosive material. Standard iterative methods show a quick reduction of the residual followed by a slow final convergence to the solution at high iterations. Such systems are excellent choices for the use of multigrid methods to speed up convergence, even on a nonlinear system such as this. Numerical steady-state solutions to the eikonal equation on a rectangular grid are conducted. Results are presented for a square grid in 2D and a cubic grid in 3D using a Runge-Kutta time iteration for the smoothing operator until steady-state is reached

PROFIBUS-DP to G-64 configurable interface

Since many years, the SL/BT group has developed specific G-64 hardware modules for the control of the fast pulsed magnets. Up to now, the integration of these modules into the accelerator control system has been done using a MIL1553 fieldbus in command/response mode connected to a LynxOS front-end. In 1996 and 1998, recommendations for the use of industrial fieldbuses and programmable logic controllers were issued at CERN. In order to integrate the existing G-64 hardware into this environment based on industrial components, an interface between the G-64 bus and the PROFIBUS-DP fieldbus has been developed. This interface is based on a modular and open hardware architecture with on one side an off-the-shelf industrial, fieldbus independent, interface and on the other side a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). Required functionality has been implemented within the FPGA with VHDL (Very high-speed integrated circuit Hardware Description Language)

Thermal Regulation of the CMS Preshower Windows

A prototype Preshower ( SE) `window' has been used to test the viability of a thermal regulation scheme whose final purpose is to maintain the inside of the Preshower at a low temperature ( -10 degrees C) whilst presenting an ambient ( 18 degrees C) temperature to neighbouring detectors. A simple control layout with coarse segmentation was found to be sufficient, foregoing the need for a complex multivariable controller. The measurements are in agreement with simulation and confirm that a stabilization in time of the SE external faces within a few tenths of a degree can be achieved, as required by the Endcap ECAL

Opening the Floor to PLCs and IPCs: CODESYS in UNICOS

This paper presents the integration of a third industrial programming environment for process control applications with the UNICOS (Unified Industrial Control System) framework at CERN. The UNICOS framework is widely used in many process control domains (e.g. Cryogenics, Cooling, Gas Systems