

TUBT005



REPORT ON THE PCAPAC 2000 WORKSHOP

R. Bacher*, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY, D-22603 Hamburg, Germany

Abstract Participation in PCaPAC 2000 reached an all-time high
In October 2000, the third PCaPAC (PCs and Particle of 127 registered attendees from 43 different institutes
Accelerator Controls) workshop took place at DESY. and 17 countries.
This paper presents a summary of the workshop. The :25.6+23 723,&6
workshop reviewed existing and new PC-based
accelerator control systems, from small-scale to large-
scale installations. It demonstrated convincingly the 2.1 Scientific Programme
advantage of modern, commercial mass-market products
used for accelerator controls. Disadvantages of these The scientific programme of the workshop was
technologies were reported as well. Large-scale PC categorized according the following topics:
systems inherently bring administrative concerns into the Controlling Accelerator Subsystems and Experiments (37
picture. In this vein, special emphasis was given to contributions)
system administration for distributed systems. A major  running systems: including commercial or
topic of the workshop was the integration of different SCADA systems
control system approaches as well as the integration of  peripheral systems: including archiving, alarm,
different platforms within the same control system. In sequencing etc.
particular, PC-based concepts offer the simple  process control: including OPC
opportunity to interface to commercial SCADA systems.  data acquisition
In addition, large emphasis was given to the presentation  real-time solutions
of future developments including the next network trends Interfacing Accelerator Hardware (2 contributions)
to data exchange via SOAP and XML.  IO control
,1752'8&7,21  field busses
 device drivers etc.
Accelerator Control Objects and Components (14
The PCaPAC (PCs and Particle Accelerator Controls) contributions)
workshop began in October 1996 at DESY and was  object-oriented design and implementation
designed to be a biennial workshop. The second involving OLE, DCOM, ActiveX, Java, Java
workshop was held in January 1999 at KEK and the third Beans, CORBA, C++ etc.
took place in October 2000 again at DESY. PCaPAC is Integrating Different Systems (6 contributions)
scheduled to be held in the "non-ICALEPCS" years.  operating systems and platforms
PCaPAC is not in conflict to ICALEPCS, although it  commercial systems, SCADA systems, in-house
arXiv: 31 Oct 2001 has a significant overlap in topics with ICALEPCS due to systems, web-based systems
the common focus on accelerator control systems. Control System Architecture (15 contributions)
However, PCaPAC focus particularly onto the impact of  methods of distributing control and data
PCs to particle accelerator controls. The usage of PCs exchange mechanisms
bring especial advantages as well as disadvantages.  layering models for data flow
Therefore, the workshop provides a platform to exchange System Administration and Project Management (7
ideas and experience in the dedicated field of PC-related contributions)
technologies where trends are changing rapidly and where  impact of system administration on machine
the pace at which hardware as well as software evolve is operation
very fast.  control system project management using PC-
PCaPAC is designed to be a workshop. Following this based tools
approach, no parallel sessions were scheduled to give Operator Interface (3 contributions)
everybody a chance to attend. The morning sessions were  man-machine interface
dedicated to oral presentation categorized according to  ergonomics etc.
the announced workshop topics. The afternoon sessions Future Trends and Technologies (8 contributions)
were split; a poster session was followed by an open-  XML, 64-bit processors, WAP, data
discussion session guided by a chairman. These warehousing and mining, blue tooth
discussion sessions picked up open questions left from  accommodating trends in old systems
the morning sessions and provided a forum to discuss In total, 92 contributions (oral: 31, poster: 58, tutorial:
special topics raised by the conference attendees or the 3) were presented (see Fig.1).
chairman.








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Figure 1: Number of talks and tutorials versus presenting institutes


2.2 Status and Progress Reports standard LonWorks field bus network. Each branch of the
network is attached to a PC. Device servers running on
At PCaPAC 2000, many running accelerators of which these PCs map the devices and their properties onto 1500
the control-system infrastructure was based entirely or in objects and make them remotely available using CORBA.
part on PCs were presented. Among these were small On the client side, the objects are wrapped into specially
systems built and maintained by a few people (e.g. the developed Java Beans called Abeans [2], which provide
storage rings ASTRID and ELISA of the ISA Storage also a rich framework of tools that clients always need.
Ring Facilities at the University of Aarhus in Denmark), This allows applications to be written easily, even by
medium-scale systems (e.g. the ANKA synchrotron light nonprogrammers.
source in Karlsruhe in Germany, and accelerators at KEK COACK (Component Oriented Accelerator Control
in Japan) and probably the largest PC-based control Kernel) [3] being developed at KEK in Japan in joint
systems for the HERA, PETRA and DORIS storage rings venture with IT-industry is a general-purpose kernel for
and their injectors at DESY in Hamburg (Germany). The accelerator controls based on Microsoft's COM/DCOM
volume and success of development work was manifest in foundation. It consists of different components like a
a series of corresponding status reports. class builder, data cache, message exchanger (peer-to-
The idea of the control system for the synchrotron peer and publish-subscribe type communication),
radiation light source ANKA is to provide a user-friendly accelerator virtual machine, operation support (scheduling
control system where "user" means a physicist operating and polling), database (SQL, XML, Excel) and
the accelerator and not a computer expert [1]. The control data/command logging, own registry and diagnostic tools
system contains around 500 physical devices (power (session manager and status display). In addition, support
supplies, vacuum pumps, beam position monitors, RF to integrate complete SCADA systems and lab
generators, etc.) The device I/O is handled by self- automation software like LabView or HPVEE is
sufficient micro-controller boards, which connect to a provided.








2.3 System Administration Concerns 2.5 Future Trends and Technologies

The distributed nature of PC-based control systems is PCaPAC has been seen to be worthwhile in discussions
manifest in the important role that is played by system involving the technologies of the fast evolving internet.
administration. A. Pace from CERN [8] demonstrated impressively the
The automated installation for Linux PCs usage of the Web as a platform-independent application
(reconstruction farms, work group server and desktop platform and the potential of SOAP (Simple Object
workstations) is done at DESY with YaST, the Access Protocol) as a Web-wide application protocol
administration tool of the SuSE Linux distribution. In based on HTTP and XML. He recommended the
spring 2000, SuSE has introduced the successor tool integration of the control systems into the Web to make
YaST2 [4]. DESY took the chance to influence the Web technologies to be the core and not the border of the
YaST2 development in an early stage and have SuSE control systems. Furthermore, he pointed out the
integrate features to turn YaST2 into a network based possibilities which rendering software provides. This will
configuration management. YaST2 takes a fully modular open control systems not only to traditional Web
approach to configuration, installation, and administration browsers but also mobile phones, WebTV or any internet
of the system. It comes with its own scripting language enabled device.
ycp (YaST control protocol), which has an interface to $&.12:/('*(0(17
call other code, like C, perl, or shell script. YaST2
supports remote, network transparent configuration,
installation, and administration of a PC or a group of PCs The author would like to thank P. Duval, I. Nikodem, J.
by users or group administrators. The configuration is Maa, R. Schmidt, R. Schrder and W. Schtte for their
stored on a network database. Existing configurations can great enthusiasm and effort organizing the PCaPAC 2000
be cloned to set up clusters of identical PCs. A workshop.
hierarchical administration structure can be realised.
To manage the Windows-based HERA console 5()(5(1&(6
workstations at DESY, NetInstall is used for system and
application management [5]. The idea is to use the same
tool for the HERA consoles as for the desktop PCs at [1] M. Plesko and the KGB Team, Proceedings of
DESY. The benefit is threefold, (1) sharing of knowledge, PCaPAC 2000 workshop, ID 96 (Managing the
Development of a New Control System) and ID 115
(2) exporting control software to all office PCs at DESY (ANKA Control System Takes Control) and references
and (3) importing standard software from central therein
application support. About 50 dedicated control PCs are [2] M. Plesko and G. Tkacik, Proceedings of PCaPAC
located in various control rooms. The update of DLLs and 2000 workshop, ID 89 (How to Build Professional
other important software is done at logon time. In Control System Applications)
addition, a check of the control application at launch time [3] I. Abe et al., Proceedings of PCaPAC 2000 workshop,
for newer versions is performed. ID 117 (Recent Status of COACK and its Functions)
[4] T. Kleinwort and K. Woller, Proceedings of PCaPAC
2.4 Integrating Different Control Systems 2000 workshop, ID 131 (YaST2 Based Automated Linux
Installations at DESY  Taking Central Linux Support to
It is a common and unavoidable experience that the Next Level)
different control systems have to be interfaced. Complete [5] C. Trachimow, Proceedings of PCaPAC 2000
commercial SCADA systems as well as in-house workshop, ID 136 (System Management in a Windows
developed control systems have to be integrated into based Control Environment)
other accelerator control systems. [6] Z. Kakucs, P. Duval and M. Clausen, Proceedings of
An example is the EPICS-to-TINE translator [6] at PCaPAC 2000 workshop, ID 128 (An EPICS to TINE
DESY. TINE is the dominant accelerator control system Translator)
protocol at HERA [7]. The translator server resides [7] P. Duval, Proceedings of PCaPAC 2000 workshop, ID
directly on the EPICS IOC. The EPICS names are 69 (The TINE Control System Protocol: Status Report)
mapped to TINE device names. The Channel Access [8] A. Pace, Proceedings of PCaPAC 2000 workshop, ID
140 (Can Future Web Technologies Profit to Accelerator
Protocol is by-passed and the process variables are Control?)
accessed directly using the database access layer
including the necessary data type conversions. * for the PCaPAC 2000 organizing committee
http://desyntwww.desy.de/pcapac/



