FRIB, East Lansing, Michigan, USA
Development of many software projects at the Facility of Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) follows an agile development approach. An important part of this practice is to make new software versions available to users frequently to meet their changing needs during commissioning and to get feedback from them in a timely manner. However, building, testing, packaging, and deploying software manually can be a time-consuming and error-prone process. We will present processes and tools used at FRIB to standardize and automate the required steps. We will also describe our experience upgrading control system computers to a new operating system version as well as to a new EPICS release.
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.
FRIB, East Lansing, Michigan, USA
The driver linac of the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) contains 332 cavities which are controlled by individual FPGA-based low-level RF controllers. Due to limited hardware resources the EPICS IOCs cannot be embedded in the low-level RF controllers but are running on virtual machines communicating with the devices over Ethernet. An EPICS support module communicating with the devices over UDP has been developed based on the Asyn library. It supports efficient read and write access for both scalar and array data as well as support for triggering actions on the device. Device-related parameters like register addresses and data types are configurable in the EPICS record database making the support module independent of the hardware and the application. This also allows engineers to keep up with evolving firmware without recompiling the support library. The implementation of the support module leverages modern C++ features and relies on timers for periodic communication, timeouts, and detection of communication problems. The latter allows the communication code to be tested separately from the timers keeping the run time of the unit tests short.
FRIB, East Lansing, Michigan, USA
RecCaster is an EPICS module which is responsible for uploading Process Variables (PVs) metadata from the IOC database to a central server called RecCeiver. The RecCeiver service is a custom-built application that passes this data on to the ChannelFinder, a REST-based search service. Together, RecCaster and RecCeiver form the building blocks of RecSync. RecCeiver is not a distributed service which makes it challenging to ensure high availability and fault-tolerance to its clients. We have implemented a new version of RecCaster which uploads the PV metadata to ETCD. ETCD is a commercial off-the-shelf distributed key-value store intended for high availability data storage and retrieval. It provides fault-tolerance as the service can be replicated on multiple servers to keep data consistently replicated. ETCD is a drop-in replacement for the existing RecCeiver to provide data storage and retrieval for PV metadata. Also, ETCD has a well-documented interface for client operations including the ability to live-watch the PV metadata for its clients. This paper discusses the design and implementation of RecSyncETCD as a fault-tolerant service for storing and retrieving EPICS PV metadata.
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.