FRIB, East Lansing, Michigan, USA
The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, once completed, will require hundreds of devices throughout the machine to operate using synchronized timestamps and triggering events. These include, but are not limited to fault timestamps, time-dependent diagnostic measurements and complex beam pulse patterns. To achieve this design goal, we utilize a timing network using off-the-shelf hardware from Micro Research Finland. A GPS time base is also utilized to provide client timestamping synchronization via NTP/PTP. We describe our methods for software-generated event and beam pulse patterns, performance of installed equipment against project requirements, integration with other systems and challenges encountered during development.
