STFC/RAL/ISIS, Chilton, Didcot, Oxon, United Kingdom
The migration of the ISIS Controls System from Vsystem to EPICS presents a significant challenge and risk to the day-to-day operations of the accelerator. An evaluation of potential options has indicated that the most effective migration method to mitigate against this risk is to make use of a ‘hybrid’ system running Vsystem and EPICS simultaneously. This allows for a phased porting of controls hardware from the existing software to EPICS. This work will outline the prototype Vsystem/EPICS bridge that will facilitate this hybrid operation, referred to as pvecho. The bridge has been developed in Python, utilising existing communication from Vsystem to an MQTT broker developed as part of a previous project. Docker containers have been used for its development to create an isolated test environment to allow the software to communicate with other services currently used at ISIS.
STFC/RAL/ISIS, Chilton, Didcot, Oxon, United Kingdom
The ISIS Neutron and Muon Source accelerators are currently operated using Vsystem control software. Archiving of controls data is necessary for immediate fault finding, to facilitate analysis of long-term trends, and to provide training datasets for machine learning applications. While Vsystem has built-in logging and data archiving tools, in recent years we have greatly expanded the range and quantity of data archived using an open-source software stack including MQTT as a messaging system, Telegraf as a metrics collection agent, and the Influx time-series database as a storage backend. Now that ISIS has begun the transition from Vsystem to EPICS this software stack will need to be replaced or adapted. To explore the practicality of adaptation, a new Telegraf plugin allowing direct collection of EPICS data has been developed. We describe the current Vsystem-based controls data archiving solution in use at ISIS, future plans for EPICS, and our plans for the transition while maintaining continuity of data.
WEPV050
STFC/RAL/ISIS, Chilton, Didcot, Oxon, United Kingdom
Control system developers at the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source have been using Docker container technology as an efficient means to trial and develop interconnected software systems. We outline how the group has been able to use pre-existing container images in the traditional style for recording system metrics (e.g., TIG stack) and other telemetry. Furthermore, with the ISIS control system migrating from Vsystem to EPICS, we report how core components of these systems have been built and used within containers. We finally discuss whether such container technology could be used to implement the end goal of a full EPICS control system, or whether it is best suited to exploratory investigations.
THPV016
STFC/RAL/ISIS, Chilton, Didcot, Oxon, United Kingdom