Author: Zagar, K.     [Žagar, K.]
Paper Title Page
TUAAULT03 BLED: A Top-down Approach to Accelerator Control System Design 537
 
  • J. Bobnar, K. Žagar
    COBIK, Solkan, Slovenia
 
  In many ex­ist­ing con­trols pro­jects the cen­tral database/in­ven­to­ry was in­tro­duced late in the pro­ject, usu­al­ly to sup­port in­stal­la­tion or main­te­nance ac­tiv­i­ties. Thus con­struc­tion of this database was done in a bot­tom-up fash­ion by re­verse en­gi­neer­ing the in­stal­la­tion. How­ev­er, there are sev­er­al ben­e­fits if the cen­tral database is in­tro­duced early in ma­chine de­sign, such as the abil­i­ty to sim­u­late the sys­tem as a whole with­out hav­ing all the IOCs in place, it can be used as an input to the in­stal­la­tion/com­mis­sion­ing plan, or act as an en­forcer of cer­tain con­ven­tions and qual­i­ty pro­cess­es. Based on our ex­pe­ri­ence with the con­trol sys­tems, we have de­signed a cen­tral database BLED (Best and Lean­est Ever Database), which is used for stor­age of all ma­chine con­fig­u­ra­tion and pa­ram­e­ters as well as con­trol sys­tem con­fig­u­ra­tion, in­ven­to­ry, and ca­bling. First im­ple­men­ta­tion of BLED sup­ports EPICS, mean­ing it is ca­pa­ble of stor­age and gen­er­a­tion of EPICS tem­plates and sub­sti­tu­tion files as well as archive, alarm and other con­fig­u­ra­tions. With a goal in mind to pro­vide func­tion­al­i­ty of sev­er­al ex­ist­ing cen­tral databas­es (IRMIS, SNS db, DBSF etc.) a lot of ef­fort has been made to de­sign the database in a way to han­dle ex­treme­ly large set-ups, con­sist­ing of mil­lions of con­trol sys­tem points. Fur­ther­more, BLED also stores the lat­tice data, thus pro­vid­ing ad­di­tion­al in­for­ma­tion (e.g. sur­vey data) re­quired by dif­fer­ent en­gi­neer­ing groups. The lat­tice im­port/ex­port tools among oth­ers sup­port MAD and TraceWin Tools for­mats which are wide­ly used in the ma­chine de­sign com­mu­ni­ty.  
slides icon Slides TUAAULT03 [4.660 MB]  
 
WEPMU040 Packaging of Control System Software 1168
 
  • K. Žagar, M. Kobal, N. Saje, A. Žagar
    Cosylab, Ljubljana, Slovenia
  • F. Di Maio, D. Stepanov
    ITER Organization, St. Paul lez Durance, France
  • R. Šabjan
    COBIK, Solkan, Slovenia
 
  Funding: ITER European Union, European Regional Development Fund and Republic of Slovenia, Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology
Con­trol sys­tem soft­ware con­sists of sev­er­al parts – the core of the con­trol sys­tem, drivers for in­te­gra­tion of de­vices, con­fig­u­ra­tion for user in­ter­faces, alarm sys­tem, etc. Once the soft­ware is de­vel­oped and con­fig­ured, it must be in­stalled to com­put­ers where it runs. Usu­al­ly, it is in­stalled on an op­er­at­ing sys­tem whose ser­vices it needs, and also in some cases dy­nam­i­cal­ly links with the li­braries it pro­vides. Op­er­at­ing sys­tem can be quite com­plex it­self – for ex­am­ple, a typ­i­cal Linux dis­tri­bu­tion con­sists of sev­er­al thou­sand pack­ages. To man­age this com­plex­i­ty, we have de­cid­ed to rely on Red Hat Pack­age Man­age­ment sys­tem (RPM) to pack­age con­trol sys­tem soft­ware, and also en­sure it is prop­er­ly in­stalled (i.e., that de­pen­den­cies are also in­stalled, and that scripts are run after in­stal­la­tion if any ad­di­tion­al ac­tions need to be per­formed). As dozens of RPM pack­ages need to be pre­pared, we are re­duc­ing the amount of ef­fort and im­prov­ing con­sis­ten­cy be­tween pack­ages through a Maven-based in­fras­truc­ture that as­sists in pack­ag­ing (e.g., au­to­mat­ed gen­er­a­tion of RPM SPEC files, in­clud­ing au­to­mat­ed iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of de­pen­den­cies). So far, we have used it to pack­age EPICS, Con­trol Sys­tem Stu­dio (CSS) and sev­er­al de­vice drivers. We per­form ex­ten­sive test­ing on Red Hat En­ter­prise Linux 5.5, but we have also ver­i­fied that pack­ag­ing works on Cen­tOS and Sci­en­tif­ic Linux. In this ar­ti­cle, we de­scribe in greater de­tail the sys­tem­at­ic sys­tem of pack­ag­ing we are using, and its par­tic­u­lar ap­pli­ca­tion for the ITER CODAC Core Sys­tem.
 
poster icon Poster WEPMU040 [0.740 MB]