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U.S. Department of Energy
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The CEBAF control system

Technical Report ·
DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/383634· OSTI ID:383634
CEBAF has recently upgraded its accelerator control system to use EPICS, a control system toolkit being developed by a collaboration among laboratories in the US and Europe. The migration to EPICS has taken place during a year of intense commissioning activity, with new and old control systems operating concurrently. Existing CAMAC hardware was preserved by adding a CAMAC serial highway link to VME; newer hardware developments are now primarily in VME. Software is distributed among three tiers of computers: first, workstations and X terminals for operator interfaces and high level applications; second, VME single board computers for distributed access to hardware and for local control processing; third, embedded processors where needed for faster closed loop operation. This system has demonstrated the ability to scale EPICS to controlling thousands of devices, including hundreds of embedded processors, with control distributed among dozens of VME processors executing more than 125,000 EPICS database records. To deal with the large size of the control system, CEBAF has integrated an object oriented database, providing data management capabilities for both low level I/O and high level machine modeling. A new callable interface which is control system independent permits access to live EPICS data, data in other Unix processes, and data contained in the object oriented database.
Research Organization:
Southeastern Universities Research Association, Inc., Newport News, VA (United States). Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
DOE Contract Number:
AC05-84ER40150
OSTI ID:
383634
Report Number(s):
DOE/ER/40150--381; CEBAF-PR--95-050; ON: DE96015336
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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