Oct 3 – 7, 2011
Auditorium
Europe/Zurich timezone
EPICS Collaboration Meeting fall 2011

A IOC based on PXI and virtualization technology

Oct 5, 2011, 11:45 AM
15m
WHGA/001 (Auditorium)

WHGA/001

Auditorium

Paul Scherrer Institute

Speaker

Mr James R. Piton (Brazilian Synchrotron Light Laboratory-LNLS)

Summary

The Brazilian Synchrotron Light Laboratory (LNLS) has a 1.37 GeV machine open to scientific community since 1997. More recently, the control system of its beamlines, originally designed within a proprietary Delphi/Windows platform, is going through an upgrade to the open source EPICS/Linux platform used in many other synchrotrons. Within this upgrade strategy, the use of off-the-shelf hardware was also considered an alternative to the original in-house developed equipment, while keeping the EPICS/Linux compatibility. As a possible solution, a PXI chassis and its modules were made available to EPICS through the NI Real-Time Hypervisor virtualization system that allows running simultaneously EPICS/Linux and LabVIEW RT in the same PXI controller, sharing a common memory block for communication. A data exchange protocol was developed to implement motor, scaler and binary in/out EPICS records and channel access in the Linux layer, leaving the low-level hardware control to the LabView RT layer. The data exchange was done using optimized libraries of the virtualization system that allows a robust yet flexible operation of IOCs. This solution was tested to fully control an X-ray absorption spectroscopy beamline, showing a substantial reduction of counting deadtime, stability and software development time for integrating new hardware.

Primary authors

Mr Bruno C. Yenikomochian (National Instruments Brasil) Mr Diego O. Omitto (Brazilian Synchrotron Light Laboratory-LNLS) Dr Harry Westfahl Jr. (Brazilian Synchrotron Light Laboratory-LNLS) Mr James R. Piton (Brazilian Synchrotron Light Laboratory-LNLS) Mr Marcio P. Donadio (Brazilian Synchrotron Light Laboratory-LNLS) Mr Marco A. Raulik (Brazilian Synchrotron Light Laboratory-LNLS)

Presentation materials