ICALEPCS2011 - List of Authors (Haberer, Th.)

Paper

Title

Page

Upgrade of the Server Architecture for the Accelerator Control System at the Heidelberg Ion Therapy Center

78

J.M. Mosthaf, Th. Haberer, S. Hanke, K. Höppner, A. Peters, S. Stumpf
HIT, Heidelberg, Germany

The Heidelberg Ion Therapy Center (HIT) is a heavy ion accelerator facility located at the Heidelberg university hospital and intended for cancer treatment with heavy ions and protons. It provides three treatment rooms for therapy of which two using horizontal beam nozzles are in use and the unique gantry with a 360° rotating beam port is currently under commissioning. The proprietary accelerator control system runs on several classical server machines, including a main control server, a database server running Oracle, a device settings modeling server (DSM) and several gateway servers for auxiliary system control. As the load on some of the main systems, especially the database and DSM servers, has become very high in terms of CPU and I/O load, a change to a more up to date blade server enclosure with four redundant blades and a 10Gbit internal network architecture has been decided. Due to budgetary reasons, this enclosure will at first only replace the main control, database and DVM servers and consolidate some of the services now running on auxiliary servers. The internal configurable network will improve the communication between servers and database. As all blades in the enclosure are configured identically, one dedicated spare blade is used to provide redundancy in case of hardware failure. Additionally we plan to use virtualization software to further improve redundancy and consolidate the services running on gateways and to make dynamic load balancing available to account for different performance needs e.g. in commissioning or therapy use of the accelerator.

Slides MOMMU009 [0.233 MB]

Poster MOMMU009 [1.132 MB]

MOPMS030

Improvement of the Oracle Setup and Database Design at the Heidelberg Ion Therapy Center

393

K. Höppner, Th. Haberer, J.M. Mosthaf, A. Peters
HIT, Heidelberg, Germany
G. Fröhlich, S. Jülicher, V.RW. Schaa, W. Schiebel, S. Steinmetz
GSI, Darmstadt, Germany
M. Thomas, A. Welde
Eckelmann AG, Wiesbaden, Germany

The HIT (Heidelberg Ion Therapy) center is an accelerator facility for cancer therapy using both carbon ions and protons, located at the university hospital in Heidelberg. It provides three therapy treatment rooms: two with fixed beam exit (both in clinical use), and a unique gantry with a rotating beam head, currently under commissioning. The backbone of the proprietary accelerator control system consists of an Oracle database running on a Windows server, storing and delivering data of beam cycles, error logging, measured values, and the device parameters and beam settings for about 100,000 combinations of energy, beam size and particle number used in treatment plans. Since going operational, we found some performance problems with the current database setup. Thus, we started an analysis in cooperation with the industrial supplier of the control system (Eckelmann AG) and the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung. It focused on the following topics: hardware resources of the DB server, configuration of the Oracle instance, and a review of the database design that underwent several changes since its original design. The analysis revealed issues on all fields. The outdated server will be replaced by a state-of-the-art machine soon. We will present improvements of the Oracle configuration, the optimization of SQL statements, and the performance tuning of database design by adding new indexes which proved directly visible in accelerator operation, while data integrity was improved by additional foreign key constraints.

Poster MOPMS030 [2.014 MB]

Paper	Title	Page
MOMMU009	Upgrade of the Server Architecture for the Accelerator Control System at the Heidelberg Ion Therapy Center	78
	J.M. Mosthaf, Th. Haberer, S. Hanke, K. Höppner, A. Peters, S. Stumpf HIT, Heidelberg, Germany
	The Heidelberg Ion Therapy Center (HIT) is a heavy ion accelerator facility located at the Heidelberg university hospital and intended for cancer treatment with heavy ions and protons. It provides three treatment rooms for therapy of which two using horizontal beam nozzles are in use and the unique gantry with a 360° rotating beam port is currently under commissioning. The proprietary accelerator control system runs on several classical server machines, including a main control server, a database server running Oracle, a device settings modeling server (DSM) and several gateway servers for auxiliary system control. As the load on some of the main systems, especially the database and DSM servers, has become very high in terms of CPU and I/O load, a change to a more up to date blade server enclosure with four redundant blades and a 10Gbit internal network architecture has been decided. Due to budgetary reasons, this enclosure will at first only replace the main control, database and DVM servers and consolidate some of the services now running on auxiliary servers. The internal configurable network will improve the communication between servers and database. As all blades in the enclosure are configured identically, one dedicated spare blade is used to provide redundancy in case of hardware failure. Additionally we plan to use virtualization software to further improve redundancy and consolidate the services running on gateways and to make dynamic load balancing available to account for different performance needs e.g. in commissioning or therapy use of the accelerator.
	Slides MOMMU009 [0.233 MB]
	Poster MOMMU009 [1.132 MB]

MOPMS030	Improvement of the Oracle Setup and Database Design at the Heidelberg Ion Therapy Center	393
	K. Höppner, Th. Haberer, J.M. Mosthaf, A. Peters HIT, Heidelberg, Germany G. Fröhlich, S. Jülicher, V.RW. Schaa, W. Schiebel, S. Steinmetz GSI, Darmstadt, Germany M. Thomas, A. Welde Eckelmann AG, Wiesbaden, Germany
	The HIT (Heidelberg Ion Therapy) center is an accelerator facility for cancer therapy using both carbon ions and protons, located at the university hospital in Heidelberg. It provides three therapy treatment rooms: two with fixed beam exit (both in clinical use), and a unique gantry with a rotating beam head, currently under commissioning. The backbone of the proprietary accelerator control system consists of an Oracle database running on a Windows server, storing and delivering data of beam cycles, error logging, measured values, and the device parameters and beam settings for about 100,000 combinations of energy, beam size and particle number used in treatment plans. Since going operational, we found some performance problems with the current database setup. Thus, we started an analysis in cooperation with the industrial supplier of the control system (Eckelmann AG) and the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung. It focused on the following topics: hardware resources of the DB server, configuration of the Oracle instance, and a review of the database design that underwent several changes since its original design. The analysis revealed issues on all fields. The outdated server will be replaced by a state-of-the-art machine soon. We will present improvements of the Oracle configuration, the optimization of SQL statements, and the performance tuning of database design by adding new indexes which proved directly visible in accelerator operation, while data integrity was improved by additional foreign key constraints.
	Poster MOPMS030 [2.014 MB]