Distributed Beamline Control System at SSRL
T.M. McPhillips, S.M. Soltis, H.D. Bellamy, P. Kuhn, and R.P. Phizackerley
Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory
A new system for the control and alignment of optical and
hardware elements is being developed on the macromolecular
crystallography beamlines at SSRL. The heterogeneous
computing environment at the beamlines is comprised of
workstations running Digital UNIX and IRIX for data collection
and processing, and computers running OpenVMS and Windows NT for
low-level motion control tasks. The control system has a
client/server architecture where the server is a multithreaded
beamline control process that coordinates multiple user-interface
and hardware-control clients. Client-server communication is
implemented using the TCP/IP network protocol, allowing the
server and various clients to be distributed over several
computers as needed. User interface clients will include a
Tcl/Tk GUI for general beamline control and alignment, and
standard data collection packages modified to communicate with
the beamline control server. Provision for multiple, simultaneous
GUI sessions on different machines will allow remote monitoring
of beamline configuration and progress of data collection.
(posted 13-Nov-97 jw)