PROTOTYPE SOFTWARE FOR NETWORK BASED DAC OPTIMIZATION

Abstract

EPICS based Ion Cyclotron Resonance Heating (ICRH) Data Acquisition Control system (DAC) client prototype is commissioned for remote operation of heating experiment. ICRH-DAC is physically distributed into two sections at RF Lab and SST-1 hall. RF Generation section at RF Lab and Transmission line, interface and antenna section at the SST-1 hall having its own independent Versa Module Euro card (VME) based DAC server. Linux client software of both DACs have been connected with Ethernet. Master DAC client acts as Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) Input/ Output Controller (IOC) server which is used for Slave DAC client communication for parameter exchange during experiment. One of such clients is Best OPI Yet (BOY), which is part of the Control System Studio (CSS) package. It provides an editor and a runtime for developing operator panel interfaces. This paper describes the prototype software with test results of the user-perceived performance analysis. We give an interpretation of the performance data, and further analyze them with respect to the memory subsystem, CPU speed and the specific implementation of networking protocols. Thorough analysis enables us to identify the performance bottlenecks and approaches to improve the performance. Software has been developed with EPICS Input-Output Controller (IOC) in a way to better accommodate these Channel access layer provided by EPICS as well as the operator panels designed in CSS BOY.