SLAC, Menlo Park, California, USA
The SLAC ATCA Scope, a 4-channel dual scope, has an EPICS support package that runs on top of SLAC’s Common Platform software and firmware, and communicates with several high-performance systems in LCLS running on the 7-slot Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA) crate. The software was completely refactored to improve the usability for IOC engineers. Once linked with an EPICS IOC, it initializes the scope hardware and instantiates the upper software stack providing a set of PVs to control the API and hardware, and to operate the oscilloscope. The exported PVs provide seamless means to configure triggers and obtain data acquisitions similar to a real oscilloscope. The ATCA scope probes are configured dynamically by the user to probe up to four inputs of the ATCA ADC daughter cards. The EPICS support package automatically manages available ATCA carrier board DRAM resources based on the number of samples requested by the user, allowing acquisitions of up to 8 GBytes per trigger. The user can also specify a desired sampling rate, and the ATCA Scope will estimate the nearest possible sampling rate using the current sampling frequency, and perform downsampling to try to match that rate. Adding the EPICS module to an IOC is simple and straightforward. The ATCA Scope support package works for all high-performance systems that have the scope common hardware implemented in its FPGAs. Generic interfaces developed in PyDM are also provided to the user to control the oscilloscope and enrich the user’s seamless overall experience.
SLAC, Menlo Park, California, USA
Among the several acquisition services available with SLAC’s high beam rate accelerator, all of which are contemplated in the acquisition service EPICS support package, resides the new Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA) Beam Line Data (BLD) service. BLD runs on top of SLAC’s common platform software and firmware, and communicates with several high-performance systems (i.e. MPS, BPM, LLRF, timing, etc.) in LCLS, running on a 7-slot ATCA crate. Once linked with an ATCA EPICS IOC and with the proper commands called in the IOC shell, it initializes the BLD FPGA logic and the upper software stack, and makes PVs available allowing the control of the BLD data acquisition rates, and the starting of the BLD data acquisition. This service permits the forwarding of acquired data to configured IP addresses and ports in the format of multicast network packets. Up to four BLD rates can be configured simultaneously, each accessible at its configured IP destination, and with a maximum rate of 1MHz. Users interested in acquiring any of the four BLD rates will need to register in the corresponding IP destination for receiving a copy of the multicast packet on their respective receiver software. BLD has allowed data to be transmitted over multicast packets for over a decade at SLAC, but always at a maximum rate of 120 Hz. The present work focuses on bringing this service to the high beam rate high-performance systems using ATCAs, allowing the reuse of many legacy in-house-developed client software infrastructures.
SLAC, Menlo Park, California, USA
* See https://epics-controls.org/resources-and-support/base/epics-7/ to learn more about EPICS 7
** Visit https://mdavidsaver.github.io/p4p/ to learn more about the P4P