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
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.