ICALEPCS 2007, Knoxville, Tennessee, October 15-19, 2007

Present Status of VEPP-5Control System

D.Yu.Bolkhovityanov, A.Yu.Antonov, R.E.KuskovThe Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics, Novosibirsk, Russia

As VEPP-5 moves to commissioning, its control system – CX – becomes more mature. CX is a distributed, networked control system based on a 3-layer “standard model‘”. It has been used for VEPP-5 control since 2000; most hardware is CAMAC and CAN-bus. Currently most control programs have switched to modular plugin-based architecture, which significantly eases development of applications and enhances the whole control system integration. Large-data-size control hardware (such as digital oscilloscopes and CCD-cameras) is fully supported by CX now. E-logbook is currently being deployed, both as a web application and with direct support in control programs. GIS technology is being introduced to the control system, which opens many interesting possibilities.

Abstract

300-MeV Linac

500-MeV Linac

DampingRing

e–

e+

VEPP-5 Injection Complex

• CAMAC and CAN-bus control hardware.• PowerPC intelligent controllers (50MHz PowerPC 852, 32M RAM, 100Mbit Ethernet), Linux.• 4 office-class Pentium-III/800 MHz, 1Gb RAM, with 4 Xinerama-joined monitors each.• 2 more PCs for dealing with hardware, with no displays.• All run Linux. Unified environment across all 3 layers of control system. Significantly simplifies life.

Hardware

VEPP-5 is destined to provide e+ and e- to all BINPe+/e- colliders (VEPP-3/VEPP-4M and VEPP-2000).Able to produce (2-5)×1010 particles in a bunch.

VEPP-5 control system software – called “CX” – was created in-house.• Is a distributed, networked 3-layer “standard model”-conformant.• Is written entirely in C and uses single-threaded approach, which ensures simplicity and reliability.• Drivers are loaded dynamically at run-time, making the system flexible.• Supports arbitrary-size channels up to 4Mb, both fixed- and variable-size. Thus, all required hardware is supported by CX directly.• Besides VEPP-5, CX was used to automate several small-scale experiments, and had proven to be adequate for such tasks.• In 2006 had switched to unified modular GUI.

SoftwareCX coversall 3 layers.

Most activitiesare supportedby standardCX libraries.

CX structure

Drivers

Motif, Xt

cxlibcda

Xh

Cdr

Chl Knobs

Driver API

Client frontend

Scheduler SupervisorChannelmanager

CX protocol

CX

-ser

ver

Cli

ent

app Xh – simplified access to X11/Xt/Motif functionality

Knobs – “screen instruments” (text,dials, sliders, …)Chl – application-level functionality

Cdr – data structuringcda – data access w/connection(s) managementcda – client-side implementation of CX protocol

Server-side implementation of CX protocol

Web has become a good platform for various supporting services.So, a dedicated Linux PC with Apache is allocated, which runs following services:

• Subversion (version control system, which stores all source files of control system and related software).• Shift planning system.• Hardware configuration database.• E-Logbook.• Forthcoming GIS (geo-information system).• Web-presentation of current status.

WebificationApplications are either “simple” or “rich”/”intelligent”.Rich ones must be coded individually and are moremanpower-consuming.In 2006 the standard libraries, which effectively constitute CXdisplay manager (chlclient) were extended to support“user-supplied”, “plug-in” display knobs in addition tostandard ones.This modular approach significantly decreases cost ofapplication development, and gives more bonuses:All applications have a unified GUI.Descriptions of displayed data are separated from code, and can be used by various generic control tools (health monitor, web publisher, data archiver, …).

Unified modular GUI

Future developmentHardware

Software: plug-insare the way to go!

Screen instrumentsGUI implementations

Screen configurationdescriptions’ readers

Math/scripting(TCL, formulae, …)

Server communication protocols

. . .CX EPICS/CA

. . .Data access frontends

CX EPICS/CA

HW DB readers(RDBMS, local, …)

Misc modules

Local drivers

Execution environment

Hardware access layers

2008 control room modifications:Long-serving PIII-800s with RedHat-7.3 will be replaced with modern PCs.

Our current OS of choice is CentOS, as most stable yet free.

4 individual (albeit joined via Xinerama) 1152×864 monitors will be replaced with a single 2560×1600 one (such as Samsung 305T).

Next, 4th version of CX is currently being written from scratch.It is based on plug-ins approach at all levels.

1. Modular implementation of data-server access layer for clients enables clients to easily access hardware, controlled by EPICS,LabVIEW, etc.2. On the other hand, replacement of a single data-access protocolimplementation in CX-server with a modular frontends architecture would allow other control systems to obtain CX-controlled data. Thus, use of plug-ins approach makes integration with other control systems an easy task.