S2Innovation, Kraków, Poland
ESRF, Grenoble, France
MAX IV Laboratory, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
Elettra-Sincrotrone Trieste S.C.p.A., Basovizza, Italy
More than 40 laboratories use Tango Controls as a framework for their control systems. During its 18 years of existence, Tango Controls has evolved and matured. The latest 9.3.3 release is regarded as the most stable and feature-reach version of the framework. However, it makes use of already outdated CORBA technology which impacts all the stack, from the low-level transport protocol up to the client API and tools. The Tango Community decided to move forward and is preparing for so-called Tango Controls v10. Tango v10 is meant to be more a new implementation of the framework than a release of new features. The new implementation shall make the code easier to maintain and extend as well as remove legacy technologies. At the same time, it shall keep the Tango Controls objective philosophy and allows the new implementation to coexist with the old one at the same laboratory. The first step in the process is to provide a formal specification of current concepts and protocol. This specification will be base for the development and verification of new source code. Formal specification of Tango Controls and its purpose will be presented along with used tools and methodologies.
LLNL, Livermore, California, USA
The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is the world’s largest laser system for Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) and High Energy Density (HED) experiments. Design of NIF control system started in the 1990s, incorporating established hardware and software technologies of that era. The architecture of the control system has stood the test of time, successfully scaling up to full 192 laser beam configuration in 2009, and then transitioning to 24x7 operations and sustaining 400 shots annually since 2016. The control system has grown with NIF to add new major capabilities, such as cryogenic layering, a petawatt-class laser, 3D neutron imaging and others. In parallel, with scaling up and efficiency optimizations, the software had to adapt to changes dictated by the fast-paced computer industry. Some of our originally chosen technologies have become obsolete and replaced by new programming languages, frameworks and paradigms. In this talk, we will discuss how the NIF control system has leveraged the strengths of its distributed, cross-platform architecture to successfully modernize "in-place" computing platforms and programming languages without impacting the demanding experiment schedule.
