ICALEPCS2013 - List of Authors (Mexner, W.)

Paper

Title

Page

The ANKA Control System: On a Path to the Future

336

N.J. Smale, E. Hertle, E. Huttel, W. Mexner, A.-S. Müller
KIT, Karlsruhe, Germany
I. Križnar
Cosylab, Ljubljana, Slovenia
S. Marsching
Aquenos GmbH, Baden-Baden, Germany

The machine control system of the synchrotron radiation source ANKA at KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) is migrating from dedicated I/O microcontroller boards that utilise the LonWorks field bus and are visualised with the ACS Corba based control system to Ethernet TCP/IP devices with an EPICS server layer and visualisation by Control System Studio (CSS). This migration is driven by the need to replace ageing hardware, and in order to move away from the outdated microcontroller's embedded LonWorks bus. Approximately 500 physical devices, such as power supplies, vacuum pumps etc, will need to be replaced (or have their I/O hardware changed) and be integrated to the new EPICS/CSS control system. In this paper we report on the technology choices and discuss justifications of those choices, the progress of migration, and how such a task can be achieved in a transparent way with a fully user operational machine. We also report on the benefits reaped from using EPICS, CSS and BEAST alarming.

Poster MOPPC099 [0.152 MB]

TUPPC005

Implementation of an Overall Data Management at the Tomography Station at ANKA

558

D. Haas, W. Mexner, H. Pasic, T. Spangenberg
KIT, Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany

New technologies and research methods increase the complexity of data management at the beamlines of a synchrotron radiation facility. The diverse experimental data such as user and sample information, beamline status and parameters and experimental datasets, has to be interrelated, stored and provided to the user in a convenient way. The implementation of these requirements leads to challenges in fields of data life-cycle, storage, format and flow. At the tomography station at the ANKA a novel data management system has been introduced, representing a clearly structured and well organized data flow. The first step was to introduce the Experimental Coordination Service ECS, which reorganizes the measurement process and provides automatic linking of meta-, logging- and experimental-data. The huge amount of data, several TByte/week, is stored in NeXus files. These files are subsequently handled regarding storage location and life cycle by the WorkSpaceCreator development tool. In a further step ANKA will introduce the European single sign on system Umbrella and the experimental data catalogue ICAT as planned as the European standard solution in the PaNdata project.

Poster TUPPC005 [1.422 MB]

TUPPC008

A New Flexible Integration of NeXus Datasets to ANKA by Fuse File Systems

566

W. Mexner, E. Iurchenko, H. Pasic, D. Ressmann, T. Spangenberg
KIT, Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany

In the high data rate initiative (HDRI) german accelerator and neutron facilities of the Helmholtz Association agreed to use NeXus as a common data format. The synchrotron radiation source ANKA decided in 2012 to introduce NeXus as common data format for all beam lines. Nevertheless it is a challenging work to integrate a new data format in existing data processing work flows. Scientists rely on existing data evaluation kits which require specific data formats. To solve this obstacle, for linux a filesystem in userspace (FUSE) was developed, allowing to mount NeXus-Files as a filesystem. Easy in XML configurable filter rules allow a very flexible view to the data. Tomography data frames can be directly accessed as TIFF files by any standard picture viewer or scan data can be presented as a virtual ASCII file compatible to spec.

Paper	Title	Page
MOPPC099	The ANKA Control System: On a Path to the Future	336
	N.J. Smale, E. Hertle, E. Huttel, W. Mexner, A.-S. Müller KIT, Karlsruhe, Germany I. Križnar Cosylab, Ljubljana, Slovenia S. Marsching Aquenos GmbH, Baden-Baden, Germany
	The machine control system of the synchrotron radiation source ANKA at KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) is migrating from dedicated I/O microcontroller boards that utilise the LonWorks field bus and are visualised with the ACS Corba based control system to Ethernet TCP/IP devices with an EPICS server layer and visualisation by Control System Studio (CSS). This migration is driven by the need to replace ageing hardware, and in order to move away from the outdated microcontroller's embedded LonWorks bus. Approximately 500 physical devices, such as power supplies, vacuum pumps etc, will need to be replaced (or have their I/O hardware changed) and be integrated to the new EPICS/CSS control system. In this paper we report on the technology choices and discuss justifications of those choices, the progress of migration, and how such a task can be achieved in a transparent way with a fully user operational machine. We also report on the benefits reaped from using EPICS, CSS and BEAST alarming.
	Poster MOPPC099 [0.152 MB]

TUPPC005	Implementation of an Overall Data Management at the Tomography Station at ANKA	558
	D. Haas, W. Mexner, H. Pasic, T. Spangenberg KIT, Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany
	New technologies and research methods increase the complexity of data management at the beamlines of a synchrotron radiation facility. The diverse experimental data such as user and sample information, beamline status and parameters and experimental datasets, has to be interrelated, stored and provided to the user in a convenient way. The implementation of these requirements leads to challenges in fields of data life-cycle, storage, format and flow. At the tomography station at the ANKA a novel data management system has been introduced, representing a clearly structured and well organized data flow. The first step was to introduce the Experimental Coordination Service ECS, which reorganizes the measurement process and provides automatic linking of meta-, logging- and experimental-data. The huge amount of data, several TByte/week, is stored in NeXus files. These files are subsequently handled regarding storage location and life cycle by the WorkSpaceCreator development tool. In a further step ANKA will introduce the European single sign on system Umbrella and the experimental data catalogue ICAT as planned as the European standard solution in the PaNdata project.
	Poster TUPPC005 [1.422 MB]

TUPPC008	A New Flexible Integration of NeXus Datasets to ANKA by Fuse File Systems	566
	W. Mexner, E. Iurchenko, H. Pasic, D. Ressmann, T. Spangenberg KIT, Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany
	In the high data rate initiative (HDRI) german accelerator and neutron facilities of the Helmholtz Association agreed to use NeXus as a common data format. The synchrotron radiation source ANKA decided in 2012 to introduce NeXus as common data format for all beam lines. Nevertheless it is a challenging work to integrate a new data format in existing data processing work flows. Scientists rely on existing data evaluation kits which require specific data formats. To solve this obstacle, for linux a filesystem in userspace (FUSE) was developed, allowing to mount NeXus-Files as a filesystem. Easy in XML configurable filter rules allow a very flexible view to the data. Tomography data frames can be directly accessed as TIFF files by any standard picture viewer or scan data can be presented as a virtual ASCII file compatible to spec.