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
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
There has been an increasing need over the last 5 years within the BNL accelerator community (primarily within the RF and Instrumentation groups) to collect, store and display data at high frequencies (1-10 kHz). Data throughput considerations when storing this data are manageable. But requests to display gigabytes of the collected data can quickly tax the speed at which data can be read from storage, transported over a network, and displayed on a users computer monitor. This paper reports on efforts to improve the performance of both reading and displaying data collected by our data logging system. Our primary means of improving performance was to build an Data Server – a hardware/software server solution built to respond to client requests for data. It's job is to improve performance by 1) improving the speed at which data is read from disk, and 2) culling the data so that the returned datasets are visually indistinguishable from the requested datasets. This paper reports on statistics that we've accumulated over the last two years that show improved data processing speeds and associated increases in the number and average size of client requests.
BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York, USA
The Electron Beam Ion Source (EBIS) began operating as a pre-injector in the C-AD RHIC accelerator complex in 2010. Historically, C-AD RHIC pre-injectors, like the 200MeV Linac, have had largely independent timing systems that receive a minimal number of triggers from the central C-AD timing system to synchronize the injection process. The EBIS timing system is much more closely integrated into central C-AD timing, with all EBIS machine cycles included in the master supercycle that coordinates the interoperation of C-AD accelerators. The integrated timing approach allows better coordination of pre-injector activities with other activities in the C-AD complex. Independent pre-injector operation, however, must also be supported by the EBIS timing system. This paper describes the design of the EBIS timing system and evaluates experience in operational management of EBIS timing.
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.