[en] ITER is an international collaborative project under development by nations representing over one half of the world's population. Major components will be supplied by 'Domestic Agencies' representing the various participating countries. While the supervisory control system, known as CODAC, will be developed 'in fund' by the International Organization at the project site in the south of France, the EPICS and PLC-based plant control subsystems are to be developed and tested locally, where the subsystems themselves are being built. This is similar to the model used for the development of the Spallation Neutron Source, which was a US national collaboration. However the much more complex constraints of an international collaboration preclude the use of many specifics of the SNS collaboration approach. Moreover, procedures for final system integration and commissioning at ITER are not yet well defined. This paper will outline the particular issues either inherent in an international collaboration or specific to ITER, and will suggest approaches to mitigate those problems with the goal of assuring a successful and timely integration and commissioning phase. (author)

[en] The Heidelberg Ion Therapy Center (HIT) is a heavy ion accelerator facility located at the Heidelberg university hospital and intended for cancer treatment with heavy ions and protons. It provides three treatment rooms for therapy of which two using horizontal beam nozzles are in clinical use and the unique gantry with a 360 degrees rotating beam port is currently under commissioning. The proprietary accelerator control system runs on several classical server machines, including a main control server, a database server running Oracle, a device settings modeling server (DSM) and several gateway servers for auxiliary system control. As the load on some of the main systems, especially the database and DSM servers, has become very high in terms of CPU and I/O load, a change to a more up-to-date blade server enclosure with four redundant blades and a 10 Gbit internal network architecture has been decided. Due to budgetary reasons, this enclosure will at first only replace the main control, database and DSM servers and consolidate some of the services now running on auxiliary servers. The internal adaptable network will improve the communication between servers and database. As all blades in the enclosure are configured identically, one dedicated spare blade is used to provide redundancy in case of hardware failure. Additionally we plan to use simulation software to further improve redundancy and consolidate the services running on gateways and to make dynamic load balancing available to account for different performance needs e.g. in commissioning or therapy use of the accelerator. (authors)

[en] The S-DALINAC is a 130 MeV recirculating electron linac that is operated in CW mode. The analog RF control system of the S-DALINAC has been replaced by a new digital system. The new hardware consists of an RF module and an FPGA board that have been developed in-house. A self-developed CPU implemented in the FPGA executing the control algorithm allows to change the algorithm without time-consuming synthesis. Another micro-controller connects the FPGA board to a standard PC server via CAN bus. This connection is used to adjust control parameters as well as to send commands from the RF control system to the cavity tuner power supplies. The PC runs Linux and an EPICS IOC. The latter is connected to the CAN bus with a device support that uses the SocketCAN network stack included in recent Linux kernels making the IOC independent of the CAN controller hardware. A diagnostic server streams signals from the FPGAs to clients on the network. Clients used for diagnosis include a software oscilloscope as well as a software spectrum analyzer. The parameters of the controllers can be changed with Control System Studio. We will present the architecture of the RF control system as well as the functionality of its components from a control system developer point of view. (authors)

[en] The monitoring of the beam conditions, equipment conditions and measurements from the beam instrumentation devices in CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) produce more than 100 Gb/day of data. Such a big quantity of data is unprecedented in accelerator monitoring and new developments are needed to access, process, combine and analyse data from different devices. The Beam Loss Monitoring (BLM) system has been one of the most reliable equipment in the LHC during its 2010 run, issuing beam dumps when the detected losses were above the defined abort thresholds. Furthermore, the BLM system was able to detect and study unexpected losses, requiring intensive offline analysis. This article describes the techniques developed to: access the data produced (about 50000 values/s); access relevant system layout information; and access, combine and display different machine data. (authors)

[en] the EPICS (Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System) channel archiver is used at different facilities at PSI (Paul Scherrer Institute) like the Swiss Light Source or the medical cyclotron. The EPICS channel archiver is a powerful tool to collect control system data of thousands of EPICS process variables with rates of many Hertz each to an archive for later retrieval. Within the package of the channel archiver version 2 you get a Java application for graphical data retrieval and a command line tool for data extraction into different file formats. For the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) we wanted a possibility to retrieve the archived data from a web interface. It was desired to have flexible retrieval functions and to allow interchanging data references by e-mail. This web interface has been implemented by the PSI controls group and has now been in operation for several years. This paper will highlight the special features of the PSI web interface to the EPICS channel archiver

[en] Database data change notification (DCN) is a commonly used feature, it allows to be informed when the data has been changed on the server side by another client. Not all database management systems (DBMS) provide an explicit DCN mechanism. Even for those DBMS's which support DCN (such as Oracle and MS SQL server), some server side and/or client side programming may be required to make the DCN system work. This makes the setup of DCN between database server and interested clients tedious and time consuming. In accelerator control systems, there are many well established software client/server architectures (such as CDEV, EPICS, and ADO) that can be used to implement data reflection servers that transfer data asynchronously to any client using the standard SET/GET API. This paper describes a method for using such a data reflection server to set up asynchronous DCN (ADCN) between a DBMS and clients. This method works well for all DBMS systems which provide database trigger functionality. (authors)

[en] The low level RF control system consists of a 101 MHz signal generator, three feedback loops, an interlock and a protection system. The stability of the control system is one of the most important indicators in the cyclotron design, especially when the whole system has a high current. Due to the hugeness of the RF system and the complexity of control objects, the low level RF control system must combine the basic theory with the electronic circuit to optimize the whole system. The major obstacles in the research, which rarely exist in other control systems, lay in the coupling of beam and resonant cavity, requiring to be described by the transfer function between beam and cavity, the complex coupling between microwave devices and the interference signals of all loops. By introducing the three feedback loops (tuning loop, amplitude loop and phase loop) and test results from some parts of electric circuits, this paper unfolds the performance index and design of low level RF control system, which may contribute to the design of cyclotron with a high and reliable performance. (authors)

[en] A transverse multibunch feedback (TMBF) system is in operation at Diamond Light Source to damp coupled-bunch instabilities up to 250 MHz in both the vertical and horizontal planes. It comprises an in-house designed and built analogue front end combined with a Libera Bunch-by-Bunch feedback processor and output stripline kickers. FPGA-based feedback electronics is used to implement several diagnostic features in addition to the basic feedback functionality. This paper reports on the current operational status of the TMBF system along with its characteristics. Also discussed are operational diagnostic functionalities including continuous measurement of the betatron tune and chromaticity. (authors)

[en] Alba is the first synchrotron light source built in Spain. Most of Alba control system has been developed on top of Tango control system. An amount of 5531 devices are controlled in Alba accelerators (linac, booster and storage ring) using 150 Linux PCs. Alba maintains a central repository, so called 'Cabling and Controls database' (CCDB), which keeps the inventory of equipment, cables, connections and their configuration and technical specifications. The valuable information kept in this MySQL database enables some tools to automatically create and configure Tango devices and other software components of the control systems of Accelerators, beamlines and laboratories. This paper describes the process involved in this automatic setup

[en] The LHC Island of the CERN Control Centre is a busy working environment with many status displays and running software applications. An audible event announcer was developed in order to provide a simple and efficient method to notify the operations team of events occurring within the many subsystems of the accelerator. The LHC Announcer uses speech synthesis to report messages based upon data received from multiple sources. General accelerator information such as injections, beam energies and beam dumps are derived from data received from the LHC Timing System. Additionally, a software interface is provided that allows other surveillance processes to send messages to the Announcer using the standard control system middle-ware. Events are divided into categories which the user can enable or disable depending upon their interest. Use of the LHC Announcer is not limited to the Control Centre and is intended to be available to a wide audience, both inside and outside CERN. To accommodate this, it was designed to require no special software beyond a standard web browser. This paper describes the design of the LHC Announcer and how it is integrated into the LHC operational environment. (authors)