ORNL, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA
ORNL RAD, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA
Many applications in experimental physics facilities require custom hardware solutions to control process parameters or to acquire data at high rates with high integrity. These hardware solutions typically require custom software implementations. The neutron scattering detectors at the Spallation Neutron Source at ORNL* implement custom protocols over optical fiber connected to a PCI express based read-out board. A dedicated kernel device driver provides an interface to the software application and must be able to sustain data bursts from a pulsed source while acquiring data for long periods of time. The same optical channel is also used as low-latency communication link to detector electronics for configuration and real time fault detection. This paper presents a Linux device driver design, implementation challenges in a low-latency high-throughput setup, real use case benchmarks and importance of clean application programming interface for seamless integration in control systems. This software implementation was developed as a generic framework and has been extended beyond neutron data acquisition. It is suitable to diverse applications where it allows for rapid FPGA development.
*Oak Ridge National Laboratory
ORNL, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA
Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) is a specification for computer hardware platform management and monitoring. The interface includes features for monitoring hardware sensors like fan speed and device temperature, inventory discovery, event propagation and logging. All IPMI functionality is accessible without the host operating system running. With its wide support across hardware vendors and the backing of a standardization committee, it is a compelling instrumentation for integration into a control system for large experimental physics projects. Integrating IPMI into EPICS provides the benefit of centralized monitoring, archiving and alarming integrated with the facility control system. A new project has been started to enable this capability by creating a native EPICS device driver built on the open-source FreeIPMI library for the remote host connection interface. The driver supports automatic system components discovery for creating EPICS database templates, detailed device information from Field Replaceable Unit interface, sensor monitoring with remote threshold management, geographical PV addressing in PICMG based platforms and PICMG front panel lights readout.
