Data Acquisition
Paper Title Page
WIOM01
 Experience and Trends in Distributed Computing  
 
  • F. Gagliardi
    BSC, Barcelona, Spain
  
  For the subject I would like to speak about the current transformation of the computing landscape. The advent of Virtualization have made possible highly scaleable and affordable distributed computing systems such as those offered by Cloud providers, public or private. This poses new challenges and problems to do with latency in accessing the data, SLAs, privacy and security issues. At the same time the explosion of data has generated the emergence of new computing paradigms such as MapReduce and Hadoop and the need for new computing storage hierarchies for HPC and distributed computing. Embedded and real-time systems are also affected from these new trends.  
 
WCO201 Computing Infrastructure for Online Monitoring and Control of High-throughput DAQ Electronics 10
 
  • S.A. Chilingaryan, C.M. Caselle, T. Dritschler, T. Faragó, A. Kopmann, U. Stevanovic, M. Vogelgesang
    KIT, Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany
  
  New imaging stations with high-resolution pixel detectors and other synchrotron instrumentation have ever increasing sampling rates and put strong demands on the complete signal processing chain. Key to successful systems is high-throughput computing platform consisting of DAQ electronics, PC hardware components, communication layer and system and data processing software components. Based on our experience building a high-throughput platform for real-time control of X-ray imaging experiments, we have designed a generalized architecture enabling rapid deployment of data acquisition system. We have evaluated various technologies and come up with solution which can be easily scaled up to several gigabytes-per-second of aggregated bandwidth while utilizing reasonably priced mass-market products. The core components of our system are an FPGA platform for ultra-fast data acquisition, Infiniband interconnects and GPU computing units. The presentation will give an overview on the hardware, interconnects, and the system level software serving as foundation for this high-throughput DAQ platform. This infrastructure is already successfully used at KIT's synchrotron ANKA.  
slides icon Slides WCO201 [2.948 MB]  
 
WCO202 Data Management at the Synchrotron Radiation Facility ANKA 13
 
  • D. Ressmann, A. Kopmann, V. Mauch, W. Mexner, A. Vondrous
    KIT, Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany
  
  The complete chain from submitting a proposal, collecting meta data, performing an experiment, towards analysis of these data and finally long term archive will be described. During this process a few obstacles have to be tackled. The workflow should be transparent to the user as well as to the beamline scientists. The final data will be stored in NeXus compatible HDF5 container format. Because the transfer of one large file is more efficient than transferring many small files, container formats enable a faster transfer of experiment data. At the same time HDF5 supports to store meta data together with the experiment data. For large data sets another implication is the performance to download the files. Furthermore the analysis software might not be available at each home institution; as a result it should be an option to access the experiment data on site. The meta data allows to find, analyse, preserve and curate the data in a long term archive, which will become a requirement fairly soon.  
slides icon Slides WCO202 [2.380 MB]  
 
WCO203 Profibus in Process Controls 16
 
  • M.R. Clausen, T. Boeckmann, J. Hatje, O. Korth, J. Penning, H.R. Rickens, B. Schoeneburg
    DESY, Hamburg, Germany
  
  The cryogenic installations on the DESY campus are widely distributed. The liquid Helium (LHE) is produced in a central building. Three cryogenic plants are installed. One is in operation for FLASH the other two are currently in the commissioning phase and will be used for the European XFEL. Thousands of I/O channels are spread over the campus this way. The majority of the I/O devices are standard devices used in process control. The de facto standard for distributed I/O in process controls in Germany is Profibus. So it is obvious to use this bus also for cryogenic controls. Subsequently we developed also special electronics to attach temperature and level readouts to this field bus. Special diagnostic tools are available and permanently attached to the bus. Condition monitoring tools provide diagnostics which enable preventative maintenance planning. Specific tools were developed in Control System Studio (CSS) which is -the- standard tool for configuration, diagnostic and controls for all cryogenic plants. We will describe our experience over the last years with this infrastructure.  
slides icon Slides WCO203 [1.116 MB]  
 
WCO204 A Prototype Data Acquisition System of Abnormal RF Waveform at SACLA 19
 
  • M. Ishii, M. Kago
    JASRI/SPring-8, Hyogo-ken, Japan
  • T. Fukui
    RIKEN SPring-8 Center, Innovative Light Sources Division, Hyogo, Japan
  • T. Maruyama
    RIKEN/SPring-8, Hyogo, Japan
  • T. Ohshima
    RIKEN SPring-8 Center, Sayo-cho, Sayo-gun, Hyogo, Japan
  • M. Yoshioka
    SES, Hyogo-pref., Japan
  
  At SACLA, an event-synchronized data acquisition system had been installed. The system collects shot-by-shot data, such as representative point data of the phase and amplitude of the rf cavity pickup signals, in synchronization with the beam operation cycle. In addition, rf waveform data is collected every 10 minutes. However a collection with several minutes cycle couldn’t catch an abnormal rf waveform that suddenly occurs. To overcome this problem, we have developed a system to capture waveform when some abnormal event occurs. The system consists of the VMEbus systems, a DAQ server, and a NoSQL database system, Cassandra. The VMEbus system detects an abnormal rf waveform, collects all related waveforms with same shot and sends to a DAQ server. All waveforms are stored Cassandra via the DAQ server. The DAQ server keeps data for 2 seconds from current time on memory to complement Cassandra’s eventual consistency model. We constructed a prototype DAQ system with a minimum configuration and checked its performance. We report the requirements and structure of the DAQ system and the test results in this paper.  
slides icon Slides WCO204 [1.426 MB]  
 
WCO205 Upgrade of SACLA DAQ System Adapts to Multi-Beamline Operation 22
 
  • K. Okada, T. Abe, Y. Furukawa, T. Hatsui, Y. Joti, T.K. Kameshima, T. Matsumoto, T. Sugimoto, R. Tanaka, M. Yamaga
    JASRI/SPring-8, Hyogo-ken, Japan
  • M. Yabashi
    RIKEN SPring-8 Center, Sayo-cho, Sayo-gun, Hyogo, Japan
  
  We report the data acquisition system (DAQ) for user experiments at SACLA (the SPring-8 Angstrom Compact Free Electron Laser). The system provides standardized experimental framework to various XFEL users since March 2012. It is required to store shot-by-shot information synchronized with the XFEL beam of 60Hz at the maximum repetition rate. The data throughput goes up to 6 Gbps with TOF waveforms and/or images (e.g. X-ray diffraction images) from experiments. The data are stored to the hierarchical storage system capable of more than 6 PByte at the last stage. The DAQ system incorporates with prompt data processing performed by a 14 TFlops PC cluster as well as on-line monitoring. In 2014, SACLA will introduce the third beamline to increase the capacity of experiments. On the DAQ side, it is a challenge to operate multiple experiments simultaneously. The control and data stream will be duplicated and separated for beamlines. A new central server to manage each beamline condition in one place will help increase the efficiency of setup procedure and reduce risks of mishandling between beamlines.  
slides icon Slides WCO205 [1.472 MB]  
 
WCO206 Sardana – A Python Based Software Package for Building Scientific Scada Applications 25
 
  • Z. Reszela, G. Cuní, C.M. Falcón Torres, D. Fernandez-Carreiras, G. Jover-Mañas, J. Klora, C. Pascual-Izarra, M. Rosanes Siscart
    CELLS-ALBA Synchrotron, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain
  • T.M. Coutinho
    ESRF, Grenoble, France
  
  Sardana is a software suite for Supervision, Control and Data Acquisition in scientific installations. It aims to reduce cost and time of design, development and support of the control and data acquisition systems [1]. Sardana, thanks to the Taurus library [2], allows the user to build modern and generic interfaces to the laboratory instruments. It also delivers a flexible python based macro environment, via its MacroServer, which allows custom procedures to be plug in and provides a turnkey set of standard macros e.g. generic scans. Thanks to the Device Pool the heterogeneous hardware could be easily plug in based on common and dynamic interfaces. The Sardana development started at Alba, where it is extensively used to operate all beamlines, the accelerators and auxiliary laboratories. In the meantime, Sardana attracted interest of other laboratories where it is used with success in various configurations. An international community of users and developers [3] was formed and it now maintains the package. Modern data acquisition approaches guides and stimulates current developments in Sardana. This article describes how the Sardana community approaches some of its challenging projects.
[1] "Sardana: The Software for Building SCADAS in Scientific Environments" T.M. Coutinho et al: ICALEPCS 2011
[2] www.taurus-scada.org
[3] www.sourceforge.net/projects/sardana 		 
slides icon Slides WCO206 [11.925 MB]  
 
WCO207 A New Data Acquisition Software and Analysis for Accurate Magnetic Field Integral Measurement at BNL Insertion Devices Laboratory 28
 
  • M. Musardo, D.A. Harder, P. He, C.A. Kitegi, T. Tanabe
    BNL, Upton, New York, USA
  
  A new data acquisition software has been developed in LabVIEW to measure the first and second magnetic field integral distributions of Insertion Devices (IDs). The main characteristics of the control system and the control interface program are presented. The new system has the advantage to make automatic and synchronized measurements as a function of gap and/or phase of an ID. The automatic gap and phase control is a real-time communication based on EPICS system and the eight servomotors of the measurement system are controlled using a Delta Tau GeoBrick PMAC-2. The methods and the measurement techniques are described and the performance of the system together with the recent results will be discussed.  
slides icon Slides WCO207 [8.786 MB]  
 
FPO001 InfiniBand interconnects for high-throughput data acquisition in a TANGO environment 164
FPI01   use link to see paper's listing under its alternate paper code  
 
  • T. Dritschler, S.A. Chilingaryan, T. Faragó, A. Kopmann, M. Vogelgesang
    KIT, Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany
  
  Advances in computational performance allow for fast image-based control. To realize efficient control loops in a distributed experiment setup, large amounts of data need to be transferred, requiring high-throughput networks with low latencies. In the European synchrotron community, TANGO has become one of the prevalent tools to remotely control hardware and processes. In order to improve the data bandwidth and latency in a TANGO network, we realized a secondary data channel based on native InfiniBand communication. This data channel is implemented as part of a TANGO device and by itself is independent of the main TANGO network communication. TANGO mechanisms are used for configuration, thus the data channel can be used by any TANGO-based software that implements the corresponding interfaces. First results show that we can achieve a maximum bandwidth of 30 Gb/s which is close to the theoretical maximum of 32 Gb/s, possible with our 4xQDR InfiniBand test network, with average latencies as low as 6 μs. This means that we are able to surpass the limitations of standard TCP/IP networks while retaining the TANGO control schemes, enabling high data throughput in a TANGO environment.  
slides icon Slides FPO001 [0.511 MB]  
poster icon Poster FPO001 [3.767 MB]  
 
FPO002 Picosecond Sampling Electronics for Terahertz Synchrotron Radiation 167
FPI02   use link to see paper's listing under its alternate paper code  
 
  • C.M. Caselle, B.M. Balzer, M. Brosi, S.A. Chilingaryan, T. Dritschler, V. Judin, A. Kopmann, A.-S. Müller, L. Petzold, J. Raasch, L. Rota, M. Siegel, N.J. Smale, J.L. Steinmann, M. Vogelgesang, M. Weber, S. Wuensch
    KIT, Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany
  
  To study the synchrotron terahertz emission superconducting (YBCO) film detectors are used with the intrinsic response time in the order of a few picoseconds. For fast, continuous sampling of the individual THz ultra-short pulses a novel digitizer system has been developed. The system consists of detector, wideband low-noise amplifier, fast pulse digitizer board, back-end readout board. High-end graphic processing units (GPUs) perform real-time data analysis. Four samples with 12 bit are recorded in parallel for each fast pulse with programmable sampling times in the range of 3 to 100 ps. A new bus master DMA engine connected to PCI express endpoint has been developed to ensure a continuous high data throughput of up to 4 GByte/s. This heterogeneous real-time system architecture based on FPGA and GPU has successful been used for on-line pulse reconstruction and evaluations and calculates the peak amplitude of each pulse and the time between consecutive bunches with a picosecond time resolution at ANKA. A Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is performed on-line for the frequency analysis of the CSR undulations.  
slides icon Slides FPO002 [1.153 MB]  
 
FPO004
 Synchronous Ramp-Data Capture Scheme for Indus-2 Magnet Power Supply Control System  
 
  • A. Chauhan, R.K. Agrawal, P. Fatnani, B.N. Merh, C.P. Navathe, K. Saifee, Y.M. Sheth
    RRCAT, Indore (M.P.), India
  
  Indus-2 is a Synchrotron Radiation Source. Injection energy of electron beam is 550 MeV which is raised to 2.5 GeV using Ramping process. Magnet Power Supply Control System(MPS-CS) is used to energize magnets during filling & Ramping. Part of MPS-CS that mainly caters to Ramping consists of 19 VME stations controlling 29 Power Supplies. Global data capturing rate of MPS-CS is 1 Hz that records readback of set-value,control’s reference & power supply’s output. But Ramping changes control’s reference at rates between 20-150 Hz.So a system of 1 Hz may miss out any deviation in data occurring during Ramping at higher rate. For this purpose a Synchronized Ramp-Data Capture(RDC) scheme has been incorporated in the MPS-CS which helps in capturing & analyzing any deviation in control’s reference & power-supply readback during Ramping. Using this scheme we can capture data at distributed VME stations at the rate of Ramping-clock & in a synchronized way. Main hardware consists of a 24-bit ADC board & 18-bit DAC board for each of 29 Power Supplies & a common Ramp-clock generator board. Amount of data captured in one Ramping Cycle is between 12-14 MB which is collected & transferred to User-interface.  
 
FPO006 Integration of Independent Radiation Monitoring System with Main Accelerator Control 170
 
  • N. Kamikubota, N. Yamamoto
    KEK, Ibaraki, Japan
  • T. Iitsuka, S.Y. Yoshida
    Kanto Information Service (KIS), Accelerator Group, Ibaraki, Japan
  
  The radiation monitoring system of J-PARC was constructed as a part of safety facilities. Thus, it has been operated independently from the main accelerator control system. In fact, the radiation monitoring system consists of two subsystems. The first subsystem developed by JAEA, which covers Linac and RCS ring, is PLC-based. We add a FL-net module to this subsystem to enable one-way data transfer to the accelerator control system. Here FL-net is a device-level communication network using UDP/IP, defined by a Japanese consortium. The second subsystem developed by KEK covers MR ring. It is a CAMAC-based DAQ system. Since this subsystem was difficult to extend, we made signal branches from radiation monitors, and fed them to a new PLC-based DAQ system. As same as the first subsystem, a FL-net module is used for one-way data transfer. In 2013-2014, integration of two subsystems has been carried out. Now radiation monitors can be supervised with the accelerator control system. As a result, accelerator operators can check radiation levels much easier than before. We understand that this is a significant improvement to realize safer operation of J-PARC accelerators.  
 
FPO007
 Synchronized Beam Position Measurement System for KEK Electron/Positron Injector Linac  
 
  • M. Satoh, K. Furukawa, F. Miyahara, T. Suwada
    KEK, Ibaraki, Japan
  • T. Kudou, S. Kusano
    Mitsubishi Electric System & Service Co., Ltd, Tsukuba, Japan
  
  The KEK electron/positron linac is a 600-m-long injector that provides the beams with different energies to four independent storage rings. A nondestructive beam position monitor with the four strip-line type electrodes is utilized for the beam orbit and bunched charge measurement up to 50 Hz with the double bunch operation of 96 ns interval. Using the measured beam position, the beam orbit and energy feedback loops can be operated. The data acquisition of beam position monitor is conducted by the EPICS IOC running on the Windows-based fast digital oscilloscope. In our current system, 23 oscilloscopes process the analog data from 100 independent beam position monitors. Each data acquisition sequence has the time interval of 20 ms and is invoked by the common timing signal generated from the VME-based event timing system. Using the global beam shot number tagged by the event system, our system archived the synchronized beam position measurement among 100 monitors via 23 independent digital oscilloscopes. In this paper, the system description and the result of synchronized beam position measurement is presented in detail.  
 
FPO008 LabVIEW PCAS Interface for NI CompactRIO 173
 
  • G. Liu, C. Li, J.G. Wang, K. Xuan
    USTC/NSRL, Hefei, Anhui, People's Republic of China
  • K. Yang, K. Zheng
    National Instruments China, Shanghai, People's Republic of China
  
  When the NI LabVIEW EPICS Server I/O Server is used to integrate NI CompactRIO devices running under VxWorks into EPICS, we notice that it only supports "VAL" field, neither alarms nor time stamps are supported. In order to overcome these drawbacks, a new LabVIEW Channel Access Portable Server (PCAS) Interface is developed, and is applied to the Hefei Light Source (HLS) cooling water monitor system. The test results in the HLS cooling water monitor system indicate that this approach can greatly improve the performance of the NI CompactRIO devices in EPICS environment.  
 
FPO009 HLS Power Supply Control System Based on Virtual Machine 176
 
  • J.G. Wang, C. Li, G. Liu, K. Xuan
    USTC/NSRL, Hefei, Anhui, People's Republic of China
  
  The Hefei Light Source (HLS) is a VUV synchrotron radiation light source. It is upgraded recently to improve its performance. The power supply control system is a part of the HLS upgrade project. Five soft IOC applications running on the virtual machine are used to control 190 power supplies via MOXA's serial-to-Ethernet device servers. The power supply control system has been under operation since November 2013, and the operation results show the power supply control system is reliable and can satisfy the demands of slow orbit feedback with the frequency of 1Hz.  
 
FPO010 The Software Tools and Capabilities of Diagnostic System for Stability of Magnet Power Supplies at Novosibirsk Free Electron Laser 179
 
  • S.S. Serednyakov
    BINP SB RAS, Novosibirsk, Russia
  
  The magnetic system of Novosibirsk Free electron laser containing large amount of magnetic elements, feed by power supplies of different types. The time stability of output current of these power supplies is directly influence on coherent radiation parameters, and operation of whole FEL facility. Therefore, system for diagnostics of power supplies state, integrated to common FEL control system, was developed. The main task of this system is to analyze output current of power supply, determinate its time stability value. Also this system is able to determinate the amplitude and frequency of output current ripples, if they have a place for particular power supply, and display obtained results. The main architecture, some other capabilities, and results of usage of this system, are described in this paper.  
poster icon Poster FPO010 [2.527 MB]  
 
FPO011 PyPLC, a Versatile PLC-to-PC Python Interface 182
 
  • S. Rubio-Manrique, G. Cuní, D. Fernandez-Carreiras, Z. Reszela, A. Rubio
    CELLS-ALBA Synchrotron, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain
  
  The PyPLC [1] Tango Device Server provides a developer-friendly dynamic interface to any Modbus-based control device. Raw data structures from PLC are obtained efficiently and converted into highly customized attributes using the python programing language. The device server allows to add or modify attributes dynamically using single-line python statements. The compact python dialect used is enhanced with Modbus commands and methods to prototype, simulate and implement complex behaviors. As a generic device, PyPLC has been versatile enough to interact with PLC systems used in ALBA [2] Accelerators as well as to our Beamlines SCADA (Sardana [3]). This article describes the mechanisms used to enable this versatility and how the dynamic attribute syntax allowed to speed up the transition from PLC to user interfaces.
[1] www.tango-controls.org
[2] www.cells.es
[3] www.sardana-controls.org 		 
poster icon Poster FPO011 [1.603 MB]  
 
FPO012 A Real-Time Data Logger for the MICE Superconducting Magnets 185
 
  • J.T.G. Wilson
    STFC/DL, Daresbury, Warrington, Cheshire, United Kingdom
  
  The Muon Ionisation Cooling Experiment (MICE) being constructed at STFC’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory will allow scientists to gain working experience of the design, construction and operation of a muon cooling channel. Among the key components are a number of superconducting solenoid and focus coil magnets specially designed for the MICE project and built by industrial partners. During testing it became apparent that fast, real-time logging of magnet performance before, during and after a quench was required to diagnose unexpected magnet behaviour. To this end a National Instruments Compact RIO (cRIO) data logger system was created, so that it was possible to see how the quench propagates through the magnet. The software was written in Real-Time LabVIEW and makes full use of the cRIO built-in FPGA to obtain synchronised, multi-channel data logging at rates of up to 10kHz. This paper will explain the design and capabilities of the created system, how it has helped to better understand the internal behaviour of the magnets during a quench and additional development to allow simultaneous logging of multiple magnets and integration into the existing EPICS control system.