ORNL, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA
The Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is planning two major upgrades to the facility. The Proton Power Upgrade project, currently underway, will double the machine power from 1.4 to 2.8 MW by adding seven additional cryomodules and associated equipment. The Second Target Station project, currently in conceptual design, will construct a new target station effectively doubling the potential scientific output of the facility. This paper discusses the control system upgrades required to integrate these projects into the existing EPICS based control systems used for the machine and neutron instrument beamlines. While much of the control system can be replicated from existing solutions, some systems require new hardware and software. Operating two target stations simultaneously will require a new run permit system to safely manage beam delivery.
ORNL, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA
The importance of usability and easy-to-use user interfaces (UI) have been recognized across many domains. However, the user-friendliness of scientific experiment control systems often lags behind industry standards in the flourishing user experience (UX) field. Scientific control systems can certainly benefit from these new UX research methods and approaches. Recent instrument control system upgrade projects at the SNS and HFIR facilities at Oak Ridge National Laboratory demonstrate the effectiveness of UX focused development work, and further reveal the need for more utilization of such techniques coming from the UX field. The ongoing control system upgrades are targeting the key facility-level priority of higher scientific productivity, and UX is one of the important tools to help us achieve this priority. We will highlight research methods and practices, introduce our findings and deliverables, and share challenges and lessons learned in applying UX methods to scientific control systems.
ANL, Lemont, Illinois, USA
Osprey DCS LLC, Ocean City, USA
ORNL, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA
FHI, Berlin, Germany
SLAC, Menlo Park, California, USA
FRIB, East Lansing, Michigan, USA
ESS, Lund, Sweden
Private Address, Osseo, USA
ITER Organization, St. Paul lez Durance, France
BNL, Upton, New York, USA
The integration of structured data and the PV Access network protocol into the EPICS toolkit has opened up many possibilities for added functionality and features, which more and more facilities are looking to leverage. At the same time however the core developers also have to cope with technical debt incurred in the race to deliver working software. This paper will describe the current status of EPICS 7, and some of the work done in the last two years following the reorganization of the code-base. It will cover some of the development group’s technical and process changes, and echo questions being asked about support for recent language standards that may affect support for older target platforms, and adoption of other internal standards for coding and documentation.