BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York, USA
The next generation of high-energy nuclear physics experiments involve colliding high-energy electrons with ions, as well as colliding polarized electrons with polarized protons and polarized helions (Helium-3 nuclei). The eRHIC project proposes to add an electron accelerator to the RHIC complex, thus allowing all of these types of experiments to be done by combining existing capabilities with high energy and high intensity electrons. In this paper we describe the controls systems requirements for eRHIC, the technical challenges, and our vision of a control system ten years into the future. What we build over the next ten years will be what is used for the ten years following the start of operations. This presents opportunities to take advantage of changes in technologies but also many challenges in building reliable and stable controls and integrating those controls with existing RHIC systems. This also presents an opportunity to leverage on state of the art innovations and build collaborations both with industry and other institutions, allowing us to build the best and most cost effective set of systems that will allow eRHIC to achieve its goals.
BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York, USA
The communication framework for the in-house controls system in the Collider-Accelerator Department at BNL depends on a variety of hardware interfaces and protocols including RS232, GPIB, USB and Ethernet to name a few. IISC is a client software library, which can be used to initiate, communicate and terminate data exchange sessions with devices over the network. It acts as a layer of abstraction allowing developers to establish communication with these devices without having to be concerned about the particulars of the interfaces and protocols involved. Details of implementation and a performance analysis will be presented.
BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York, USA
Proxy servers (Proxies) have been a staple of the World Wide Web infrastructure since its humble beginning. They provide a number of valuable functional services like access control, caching or logging. Historically, controls system have had little need for full fledged proxied systems as direct, unimpeded resource access is almost always preferable. This still holds true today, however unbound direct asset access can lead to performance issues, especially on older, underpowered systems. This paper describes an implementation of a fully transparent proxy server used to moderate asynchronous data flow between selected front end computers (FECs) and their clients as well as infrastructure changes required to accommodate this new platform. Finally it ventures into the future by examining additional untapped benefits of proxied control systems like write-through caching and runtime read-write modifications.
BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York, USA
Since its inception, the RHIC control system has been built-up on UNIX or LINUX and implemented primarily in C++. Sometimes equipment vendors include software packages developed in the Microsoft Windows operating system. This leads to a need to integrate these packaged executables into existing data logging, display, and alarms systems. This paper will describe an approach to incorporate such non-UNIX binaries seamlessly into the RHIC control system with minimal changes to the existing code base, allowing for compilation on standard LINUX workstations through the use of a virtual machine. The implementation resulted in the successful use of a windows dynamic linked library (DLL) to control equipment remotely while running a synoptic display interface on a LINUX machine.
BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York, USA
The NASA Space Radiation Laboratory (NSRL) at BNL uses many different beams to do experiments associated with evaluating the possible risks to astronauts in space environments. This facility became operational in 2003 and operates from the AGS Booster synchrotron. In order to simulate the space radiation environment some of these experiments need to make use of beams of various energies. To simulate solar flare events, we implemented the Solar Particle Simulator in 2005. This system put in modifications to the accelerator controls to allow beam energies to be changed automatically, enabling target samples to be irradiated with many energies of the same type of ion, without having to make use of degraders. To simulate Galactic Cosmic events, they need to also be able to automatically change the ions used to irradiate a single sample. This project aims to allow NSRL to change ions as well as beam energies within a very short period of time. To do this requires modifications to existing controls as well as building new controls for a laser ion source. In this paper we describe NSRL, our plans to implement the Galactic Cosmic Event Simulator, and the status of the laser ion source.