Author: Pascual-Izarra, C.
Paper Title Page
MOPMU006 The Commissioning of the Control System of the Accelerators and Beamlines at the Alba Synchrotron 432
 
  • D.F.C. Fernández-Carreiras, F. Becheri, S. Blanch, A. Camps, T.M. Coutinho, G. Cuní, J.V. Gigante, J.J. Jamroz, J. Klora, J. Lidón-Simon, O. Matilla, J. Metge, A. Milán, J. Moldes, R. Montaño, M. Niegowski, C. Pascual-Izarra, S. Pusó, Z. Reszela, A. Rubio, S. Rubio-Manrique, A. Ruz
    CELLS-ALBA Synchrotron, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain
 
  Alba is a third generation synchrotron located near Barcelona in Spain. The final commissioning of all accelerators and beamlines started the 8th of March 2011. The Alba control system is based on the middle layer and tools provided by TANGO. It extensively uses the Sardana Framework, including the Taurus graphical toolkit, based on Python and Qt. The control system of Alba is highly distributed. The design choices made five years ago, have been validated during the commissioning. Alba uses extensively Ethernet as a Fieldbus, and combines diskless machines running Tango on Linux and Windows, with specific hardware based in FPGA and fiber optics for fast real time transmissions and synchronizations. B&R PLCs, robust, reliable and cost-effective are widely used in the different components of the machine protection system. In order to match the requirements in terms of speed, these PLCs are sometimes combined with the MRF Timing for the fast interlocks. This paper describes the design, requirements, challenges and the lessons learnt in the installation and commissioning of the control system.  
poster icon Poster MOPMU006 [24.241 MB]  
 
WEAAUST01 Sardana: The Software for Building SCADAS in Scientific Environments 607
 
  • T.M. Coutinho, G. Cuní, D.F.C. Fernández-Carreiras, J. Klora, C. Pascual-Izarra, Z. Reszela, R. Suñé
    CELLS-ALBA Synchrotron, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain
  • A. Homs, E.T. Taurel
    ESRF, Grenoble, France
 
  Sardana is a software for supervision, control and data acquisition in large and small scientific installations. It delivers important cost and time reductions associated with the design, development and support of the control and data acquisition systems. It enhances Tango with the capabilities for building graphical interfaces without writing code, a powerful python-based macro environment for building sequences and complex macros, and a comprehensive access to the hardware. It scales well to small laboratories as well as to large scientific institutions. It has been commissioned for the control system of Accelerators and Beamlines at the Alba Synchrotron.  
slides icon Slides WEAAUST01 [6.978 MB]  
 
FRBHMUST01 The Design of the Alba Control System: A Cost-Effective Distributed Hardware and Software Architecture. 1318
 
  • D.F.C. Fernández-Carreiras, D.B. Beltrán, T.M. Coutinho, G. Cuní, J. Klora, O. Matilla, R. Montaño, C. Pascual-Izarra, S. Pusó, R. Ranz, A. Rubio, S. Rubio-Manrique
    CELLS-ALBA Synchrotron, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain
 
  The control system of Alba is highly distributed from both hardware and software points of view. The hardware infrastructure for the control system includes in the order of 350 racks, 20000 cables and 6200 equipments. More than 150 diskless industrial computers, distributed in the service area and 30 multicore servers in the data center, manage several thousands of process variables. The software is, of course, as distributed as the hardware. It is also a success story of the Tango Collaboration where a complete software infrastructure is available "off the shelf". In addition Tango has been productively complemented with the powerful Sardana framework, a great effort in terms of development, which nowadays, several institutes benefit from. The whole installation has been coordinated from the beginning with a complete cabling and equipment database, where all the equipment, cables, connectors are described and inventoried. The so called "cabling database" is core of the installation. The equipments and cables are defined there. The basic configurations of the hardware like MAC and IP addresses, DNS names, etc. are also gathered in this database, allowing the network communication files and declaration of variables in the PLCs to be created automatically. This paper explains the design and the architecture of the control system, describes the tools and justifies the choices made. Furthermore, it presents and analyzes the figures regarding cost and performances.  
slides icon Slides FRBHMUST01 [4.616 MB]