OWG meeting 15-Feb-2008

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Agenda

  • Review of minutes from 31-Jan-2008 meeting
  • Brief status of electronics, trigger, DAQ, etc. work related to R&D and PED deliverables. See also Online_Major_Milestones. See the complete P3E schedule for details. Major Trigger/DAQ/Monitoring/Controls deliverables are:
    • Design monitoring system by Jul 2008
    • Preliminary energy-sum and master trigger designs by Sep 2008
    • Prototype staged/parallel event builder by Sep 2008
    • Design alarm system by Sep 2008
    • Design experiment control system by Sep 2008
    • Design event display by Mar 2009
    • Master trigger design by Aug 2009
  • Introduction to EPICS (see Media:EPICSforHallD.ppt) - Matt Bickley
  • Introduction to ATCA (see Media:Chris_ATCA_15Feb08.ppt)- Chris Cuevas
  • Online Design Goals and Online Major Milestones now include Electronics - Fernando, Elliott
  • Online Action Items


Time/Location

2pm Fri 15-Feb-2008 CC F326


Announcements

Next Meeting

Fri 29-Feb-2008 2pm CC F326


New Action Items from this Meeting

Minutes

Attendees: Matt Bickley, Simon T, Mark I, Elton S, Chris C, Elke A, David L, Graham H, Alex S, Vardan G, Dave A, Elliott W


R&D and PED Status

  • Graham reported he is almost done with the event management unit (EMU) design document. He will give a presentation on this in about a month.
  • Chris reviewed progres on many P3E tasks, some still have no one working on them
  • Subsystem review is in May


Introduction to Epics

Matt Bickley, head of the Accelerator Division Controls Group, gave a very nice introduction to EPICS (see Media:EPICSforHallD.ppt) and its use at JLab. Some highlights:

  • EPICS is a toolkit developed in the late 1980's at LANL and ANL
  • over 100 institutions in the EPICS collaboration
  • has been growing since then, used all over the world
  • has "tech-talk" newsgroup, usually get answers quickly
  • core architecture responsibility of about 10 people at LANL and ANL
  • tools developed by community
  • interprocess communication done by Channel Access (CA) package (UDP discovery, TCP communications)
  • CA has flat, global name space, supports many data types and many languages
  • can subscribe to or poll CA channels
  • "records" in front-ends have numerous properties, can control hardware and process hardware values
  • records can also perform calculations, cause other records to be processed, etc.
  • an EPICS "database" is a collection of records on a front-end controller
  • database records defined in ASCII files, but can use GUI tools to auto-generate ASCII (CapFast, VDCT)
  • IOC's (input-output controllers) are the front-end computers that process database records
  • IOC's can run with many operating systems (VxWorks, Linux, RTEMS)
  • "device support" and "driver support" libraries enable generic record to access particular hardware on a particular IOC
  • Many CA-compatible tools/packages exist, more created each day (archivers and viewers, alarm systems, strip charts, etc.)
  • many hardware vendors supported on VME, less on Linux, drivers usually written by users, but occasionally by vendor
  • Portable CA server (PCAS) can interface to anything
  • "Soft-IOC" can process records, but may have no connection to hardware
  • many display packages, EDM used at JLab, but also Control System Studio from DESY
  • many new Java utilities being developed, including Java PCAS
  • Accelerator has 350k records, 50k control points

Note...whatever supervisory layer Hall D chooses, it must be compatible with EPICS so that we can inter-operate with the accelerator control system

  • Some problems: learning curve, new device support, EPICS future support, new operating systems and device support, role of web interfaces, etc.


ATCA

  • Chris described ATCA, a crate/backplane standard widely used in the telecom industry
  • ATCA may be a great choice for our global trigger crate (just one crate)
  • ATCA is better established than VXS for the kind of backplane communication needed in this crate
  • ATCA crate is 8U high (vs 6U for VXS)
  • many vendors for ATCA
  • 14 slots ("shelves") per crate
  • 200 W power/shelf ok
  • includes EMC, cooling, etc.