Project for developing a low cost and high performance version of EPICS
T. V. Salikova1, A. D. Oreshkov1,
Ying Wu2, John M. J. Madey2
1Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics, 2Duke University
The development of an integrated control systems for complex industrial
and research facilities has proven to be a challenging problem given the
need
to provide for flexibility in the architecture, a rapid response
for the real time control, and an easy-to-use GUI interface
capable of effectively conveying information to update the
configuration,
status, and data. At present time, the architecture of
the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control system (EPICS)
developed by a consortium of USA national and university laboratories,
has addressed these needs in a rather successful manner.
As a result, EPICS has been widely and enthusiastically adopted as the
basis
for accelerator control in the United States and Europe.
In the proposed research, we plan to modify EPICS to allow its use
on PC computers, thereby substantially reducing the cost of the hardware
and software required to implement this system.
This development is crucial to the enhancement of the capabilities of
research and industrial facilities both in Russian and in United States.
With the advance of the computer technology, PCs have become highly
powerful
computers with comparable or higher computation power than workstations
but with much lower prices thanks to the huge PC market and the
fierce competition.
The planned porting process will include the following steps:
1) Porting of EPICS Operator Interface (OPI) traditionally
running on Unix workstations to a Intel x86 based PC running LynxOS;
2) Porting of EPICS Input Output Controller (IOC) to the LynxOS/x86
platform to replace a VME/VXI based IO system with a PCI bus based
system;
3) Testing and the debugging of ported EPICS in a homogeneous
environment
with LynxOS/x86 PCs.
(posted 13-Nov-97 jw)