Renovation and extension of supervision software leveraging reactive streams

Abstract

Inspired by the recent developments of reactive programming and the ubiquity of the concept of streams in modern software industry, we assess the relevance of a reactive streams solution in the context of accelerator controls. The promise of reactive streams, to govern the exchange of data across asynchronous boundaries at a rate sustainable for both the sender and the receiver, is alluring to most data-centric processes of CERN's accelerators. Taking advantage of the renovation of one key software piece of our supervision layer, the Beam Interlock System GUI, we look at the architecture, design and implementation of a reactive streams based solution. Additionally, we see how this model allows us to re-use components and contributes naturally to the extension of our tool set. Lastly, we detail what hindered our progression and how our solution can be taken further