Overview of EPICS-based beamline software
T. Mooney, N. Arnold, J. Sullivan, B.-C. Cha, K. Goetze, D. Wallis, B. Banerjee and F. Carter
Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Laboratory
Developers representing roughly 30 APS beamlines are collaborating to
produce and implement beamline-control and data-acquisition software
based on EPICS, a toolkit for building distributed control systems.
(EPICS is itself a collaborative effort of software developers for
accelerators, telescopes, beamlines, detectors, and various other
projects.) The underlying ideas of EPICS-based beamline software will
be discussed. Selected applications will be described and
demonstrated. Advantages and disadvantages of this approach for
developers and for end users will be discussed.
Specific topics to be addressed include the following:
- collaborative software development with EPICS
- boot-time customization of beamline software
- run-time programming options for end users
- third-party EPICS client software
- shared (local/remote) operation of a beamline
- online Web-based documentation of beamline software
(posted 27-Oct-97 jw)