The Joint Accelerator Conferences Website (JACoW) is an international collaboration that publishes the proceedings of accelerator conferences held around the world.
TY - CONF AU - Włostowski, T. AU - Serrano, J. AU - Vaga, F. ED - Corvetti, Lou ED - Riches, Kathleen ED - Schaa, Volker RW TI - Developing Distributed Hard-Real Time Software Systems Using FPGAs and Soft Cores J2 - Proc. of ICALEPCS2015, Melbourne, Australia, 17-23 October 2015 C1 - Melbourne, Australia T2 - International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems T3 - 15 LA - english AB - Hard real-time systems guarantee by design that no deadline is ever missed. In a distributed environment such as particle accelerators, there is often the extra requirement of having diverse real-time systems synchronize to each other. Implementations on top of general-purpose multi-tasking operating systems such as Linux generally suffer from lack of full control of the platform. On the other hand, solutions based on logic inside FPGAs can result in long development cycles. A mid-way approach is presented which allows fast software development yet guarantees full control of the timing of the execution. The solution involves using soft cores inside FPGAs, running single tasks without interrupts and without an operating system underneath. Two CERN developments are presented, both based on a unique free and open source HDL core comprising a parameterizable number of CPUs, logic to synchronize them and message queues to communicate with the local host and with remote systems. This development environment is being offered as a service to fill the gap between Linux-based solutions and full-hardware implementations. PB - JACoW CP - Geneva, Switzerland SP - 1073 EP - 1078 KW - real-time KW - FPGA KW - controls KW - software KW - distributed DA - 2015/12 PY - 2015 SN - 978-3-95450-148-9 DO - 10.18429/JACoW-ICALEPCS2015-THHA2I01 UR - http://jacow.org/icalepcs2015/papers/thha2i01.pdf ER -