EPICS was first used at ORNL to build the control system for the SNS accelerator. The SNS machine was built in collaboration with six partner labs who also delivered EPICS controls for their segments. EPICS has been used to the operate the machine for nearly 20 years and the original custom instrument control system has been replaced with EPICS. The recently completed PPU project extended the...
An overview of the upgrades the APS Accelerator Controls Group has introduced to our EPICS-based control system environment.
The Advanced Light Source (ALS) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a pioneering third-generation light source, has been operational since 1992. The ongoing ALS-U upgrade project aims to significantly enhance the brightness and coherent flux of X-rays with addition of a new Accumulator Ring and a new Storage Ring (SR). While the SR RF system remains unchanged for ALS-U, its control...
The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and its associated injectorsโLinac, AGS, and Boosterโhave used Accelerator Device Object (ADO)-based control system since their inception. For more than two decades, the ADO infrastructure has provided a reliable and efficient controls solution for RHIC, Linac, AGS and Booster. The Electron Ion Collider (EIC) plans to use EPICS for its control...
This year, NSLS-II will celebrate ten years since first light, and today operates 29 beamlines with two more under construction and many more planned. An overview of the current usage and organization of EPICS and related software will be presented. This overview includes brief descriptions of projects underway or planned, including IOC server virtualization, ansible based IOC deployment,...
The Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) facility at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory recently completed the installation of an X-Ray free electron laser driven by a new superconducting (SC) accelerator producing electrons with energy of 4 GeV. Now in commissioning, the control system behind the new LCLS-II accelerator is a combination of commercially available off the shelf parts, like...
We recently finished the accelerator controls system for APS-U project successfully. During this presentation, we will discuss the latest status and some achievement highlights.
We report on the progress in transitioning the ISIS accelerators from our current control system to a PVAccess based implementation of EPICS. Phoebus and PVAccess PVs are now our preferred solution for any new user interfaces and device interfaces respectively. A full-stack of Phoebus tools and other support tools are in use. We describe our pipeline for deploying conventional IOCS and our...
Sigray is a private company that develops and manufactures standalone room sized laboratory X-ray systems with performance comparable to Synchrotron Beamlines. Sigray produces Instruments for micro-xray fluorescence, computed tomography, and X-ray absorption Spectroscopy. These systems were developed using EPICS, possibly uniquely for a commercial company. Sigray has leveraged EPICS for low...
An update from the EPICS Core Developers Group describing recent additions to the core C++ software stack.
retools is a extension library for EPICS IOCs developed at the FRIB that adds regular expresion capabilities to the IOC shell. Regular expressions can be used to automate or simplify operation of the IOC shell, writing of st.cmd scripts and archiving/autosave management. Recent additions to the library include regex-capable analogs to dbpf and dbgf EPICS base functions. This...
ESS uses a fork of the PSI-developed require module to load EPICS modules at runtime to manage its IOCs. This has worked very well for managing the control system, but development and maintenance is a challenge due to the complexity of the additions to the build system. Recently we have created a proof-of-concept version of require that strips away most of the added complexity and uses only...
SNS has recently deployed IPMI monitoring for all MicroTCA based IOCs using EPICS device support module epicsipmi. While IPMI is an established and documented standard, vendors' implementation of the IPMI vary and are not always easy to support. epicsipmi had to be significantly modified to support this task, with some of the changes being specific to a particular MicroTCA vendor. This talk...
Historically, the SNS has had a patchwork of different ways to make rote processes easier and perform tasks that EPICs IOCs are not naturally capable of doing. Many programming languages have been utilized to bridge the gap from Perl to Java to VBScripting, but maintenance and reliability were challenging due to the diversity of approaches. In an attempt to build capability and automation on...
This talk will provide a comprehensive introduction to PCASpy, a powerful Python framework that simplifies the development of EPICS drivers. We will explore the fundamental concepts of PCASpy, the process of using it to create EPICS drivers in Python, including the creation and management of Process Variables (PVs), and demonstrate its practical application through real-world examples at the...
With the increasing use of p4p IOCs at the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source there is a need for RecCaster Python integration to allow, for example, use of ChannelFinder. The current implementation of the EPICS RecCaster tool is written in C++/C and is dependent on the EPICS base/modules libraries. Recsync-rs, a RecCaster library in Rust, and PyRecCaster Python bindings with cross-platform support...
The Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) is a significant upgrade to accelerator complex at Brookhaven National Lab. To service the control system requirements of the project a new hardware system is being developed named the Common Hardware Platform (CHP). The CHP will be a 2U โpizza boxโ style rackmount chassis containing a motherboard with two slots for pluggable multifunction daughterboards....
Brookhaven National Labโs Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) project plans to transition from Accelerator Device Object (ADO) framework developed for the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) applications, to the EPICS framework for new equipment control and monitoring. As part of performance testing for EIC, LLRF group received an arc detector chassis from Jefferson National Lab that was equipped...
Experience of using real-time Linux features with EPICS.
From the perspective of replacing VME and VxWorks with ยตTCA and (real time) Linux.
As the uTCA chassis started to replace our obsolete VME/VxWorks control systems at ORNL we found that each chassis was turning into a custom Linux installation. When a new chassis was brought online, a commercial Linux OS was installed and customized. These customizations were not well documented and would take many hours to re-create in the event of a system failure.
We decided a new...
While Cosylab typically adapts to the specific EPICS environment of the facility we provide services to, we are sometimes charged with setting up a new facility where there is no preexisting environment. In fact, there may be little in the way of IT infrastructure, e.g., no control system network and no place to put git repositories. Moreover, the staff may have little familiarity with EPICS...
A number of ISIS systems use communication protocols for which there are no existing IOCs. Instead, Python-based PVAccess servers have been chosen for rapid development to host associated PVs and control. However, the flexibility of p4p and EPICS means that code implementation of these servers may vary significantly between groups. This presentation will discuss how ISIS accelerator controls...
ITER's operation requires complex automation sequences that are beyond the scope of the finite state machine concept that the EPICS SNL Compiler/Sequencer implements.
The Operations Applications group is developing OACTree (Operation, Automation and Control using Behavior Trees), a new sequencing tool based on behavior trees, which has been successfully used in its first production applications.
The short talk will introduce my experience with familiarizing myself and evaluating the ITER OACTree behavior-tree based sequencer. I give my impression of the pros and cons of the approach, as well as comparing it to the traditional EPICS State Notation Language approach. Time allowing, a short demo can be presented.
The Controls (CTL) group at the Advanced Photon Source (APS) is responsible for many services, applications, and over 1,000 production IOCs. This complex infrastructure also requires the CTL group to manage and monitor the status of countless servers and storage drives. The Infrastructure Monitoring System (IMS) was created to maximize system reliability. At the core of IMS are open-source...
PV-Monitor is a system to monitor EPICS environment health, developed by CLS. It has been presented before in previous EPICS conferences. This presentation aims to expose recent improvements made to the system, as well next steps.
The two accelerators KARA and FLUTE at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology have been using Control System Studio as the main GUI for over ten years. We used the opportunity by the migration to Phoebus in order to set up a robust technical infrastructure with containers and a cluster setup aiming to provide a high availability environment. We are now in the process of transitioning the panels...
The Phoebus technology stack is a suite of tools and middle layer services designed to monitor, control, and interact with control systems like EPICS. This talk will provide an overview of recent developments contributed by members of the Phoebus collaboration. Key topics include the latest Phoebus releases, enhancements to services such as Olog, Save Restore, and ChannelFinder, and plans for...
With the increasing scale and complexity of large-scale experimental facilities and their subsystems, it quickly becomes difficult to organize operator displays in a manner conducive to efficient human operation. In this paper, we present a drop-in extension for Phoebus to track usage and navigation data for those displays, and FRIB's analyses of this data once it is collected.
The Save and Restore (SAR) service allows users to capture snapshots of a control system's state at a specific point in time, using configurations of a set of PVs. These snapshots can be restored later to revert the system to its state at the moment the snapshot was taken. Phoebus provides tools for creating and managing these configurations, as well as for retrieving, comparing, and restoring...
In this talk, we introduce TDM, a cross-platform display manager for EPICS. It is developed using a combination of several web technologies, including Node, TypeScript, Electron.js, React.js, and WebSocket. This software can be used on Linux, MacOS, Windows, and via web browser. It adopts the server-client model in Electron.js. The server is for Channel Access data acquisition and windows...
The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL) PIP-2 (Proton Improvement Plan 2) project will provide a high power linear proton accelerator to produce an intense high-energy neutrino beam for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. PIP-2 has chosen to use EPICS, Phoebus and related tools to control this new accelerator. This represents the first use of EPICS for accelerator operations...
This year, Abilene Christian Universityโs Nuclear Energy eXperimental Testing Lab (NEXT) will deploy a new 50 gallon Molten Salt Test System (MSTS) utilizing an EPICS control system. MSTS is a critical technological stepping stone for the NEXT Labโs ambitious goal to deploy the Natura MSR-1 as the Molten Salt Research Reactor by 2026. This presentation will elaborate on the process of ...
At the ISIS Accelerators the majority of our production EPICS systems are deployed in containers on three Docker Swarm servers. Our development is done on Windows using Docker (though WSL is also used) and our operators interact with the control system using Phoebus on Windows. This poses challenges when dealing with PVAccess's UDP broadcast based search across many network boundaries. To...
SNRC and CEA collaborate to the upgrade of the SARAF accelerator of deuteron and proton beams.
CEA is in charge of the control system design and implementation for the Injector, MEBT and Super Conducting Linac made up of 4 cryomodules hosting cavities and solenoids. The control system baseline [1] (MTCA and Siemens S7-1500 PLC) was presented during the EPICS meeting at Cadarache in June...
An overview of the various tests and testing capabilities of EPNix, which is a project for packaging EPICS-related software using the Nix package manager.
These tests include:
- Testing EPICS IOCs and support modules
- Testing cross-compilation
- Testing EPICS-related software, such as:
- Archiver Appliance
- Phoebus Alarm
- etc.
- Testing various network architectures
Despite progress in the adoption of machine learning to enhance control, automation and decision making in complex systems such as accelerators, there is not yet a standardized methodology for integrating these models with EPICS. In this presentation, we introduce tools and a template for integrating trained models into EPICS environments. It provides a structured approach to deployment and...
Osprey DCS is developing the Machine Learning Data Platform (MLDP) supporting machine learning and data science applications specific to large particle accelerator facilities and other large experimental physics facilities. It represents a โdata-science readyโ host platform providing integrated support for advanced data science applications used for diagnosis, modeling, control, and...
The ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana) is a powerful open-source suite of tools widely used for real-time log aggregation, analysis, and visualization. At the Advanced Photon Source (APS), the Controls group employs the ELK stack to enhance debugging, diagnostics, and usage tracking of EPICS IOCs. ELK enables us to efficiently collect, store, and analyze EPICS ioc error logs and...
The 5MW proton linear accelerator of the European Spallation Source ERIC is designed to accelerate the beam at a repetition rate of 14 Hz, which will dictate the refresh rate of most of the relevant data produced by acquisition systems. Around a thousand EPICS IOCs, mainly from RF stations and beam instrumentation, will produce large waveform PVs that cannot be feasibly transferred over the...
A high-speed data acquisition (DAQ) system that collects large amounts of fast data from various technical systems around the storage ring has been developed for the Advanced Photon Source Upgrade (APS-U) project to provide time-correlated data for statistics, diagnostics, monitoring, and fault recording. The DAQ system uses EPICS controllers to collect data from FPGAs, uses the AreaDetector...
In a collaborational effort (ITER/HZB-BESSY/ESS/PSI), a Device Support for the OPC UA industrial SCADA protocol is under development. Goals, status and roadmap will be presented.
This year, Abilene Christian Universityโs Nuclear Energy eXperimental Testing Lab (NEXT) will deploy a new 50 gallon Molten Salt Test System (MSTS) utilizing an EPICS control system. MSTS is a critical technological stepping stone for the NEXT Labโs ambitious goal to deploy the Natura MSR-1 as the Molten Salt Research Reactor by 2026. This presentation will elaborate on the tooling developed...
Sigray creates and ships many customised X-ray machines that use EPICS and Synapps as a key part of their control systems. We use docker containerization to maintain a repository of files and scripts that manage creating and running our many and varied EPICS installations, thus allowing us to freeze all software dependencies in one container image and allows us to consistently have the same...
The Fast Event System, a global time base and event-based trigger distribution system, has been developed and commissioned for the Advanced Photon Source Upgrade (APS-U) project. The hardware components developed by Miro-research Finland (MRF) are installed in 24 VME Input/Output Controllers (IOCs) deployed with EPICS software. Based on the community-supported MRF device support repository,...
APS Accelerator Controls recently upgraded the beam diagnostics cameras to digital cameras. The CS-Studio Pheobus image feature was utilized for this upgrade, and we also incorporated a new database for calibrating the beam size using a calibration mask.
The Advanced Photon Source just underwent a major upgrade of its facilities. Part of which involved the complete reconstruction of multiple beamlines. Using the XPCS beamline as a case study, this talk will go over design decisions, cross-disciplinary group effort, controls development, and analysis tooling that went into the overall end-to-end exprerience being offered at that beamline.
In this work, we integrate and extend an HKL computation
package into EPICS through a PyDevice IOC. This provides
EPICS users a generalized approach to mapping real motor
rotation space to HKL reflections for a wide range of diffrac-
tometers (4-circle, 6-circle, kappa geometries). Utilizing
PyDevice for EPICS IOC development allows us integrate
Python bindings for core calculations...
In August 2024, a team of Beamline Controls Engineers at the Synchrotron Light Source BESSY II was running the EPICS Summer School 2024, a two-week event for young engineers, computer scientists, and physicists to introduce them to the world of control systems at big science machines.
Presentations, training, guided tours of facilities, and a hands-on group project helped the trainees...
To support ITERโs remote participation plans while honoring cybersecurity requirements, we are developing the โEPICS Diodeโ, mirroring EPICS PVs through hardware devices allowing strictly one-directional network traffic.
We present the concept, implementation and status, showing the first results of scalability and performance measurements, possible enhancements and the next planned steps.
Overview of the initial PV Access prototype that uses TLS instead of plain TCP
