Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

EPICS is a set of software tools and applications used to develop distributed soft real-time control systems for scientific instruments such as a particle accelerators, telescopes and other large scientific experiments. Such distributed control systems provide control and feedback of the various parts of the device from a central control room.

EPICS is also the name of the collaboration of organizations that are involved in the software's development and use. It was originally written jointly by Los Alamos National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory, and is now used by many large scientific facilities throughout the world. Development now occurs cooperatively between these various groups, with much sharing of I/O device support and client applications.

The purpose of EPICS:

• To provide a fast, easy interface to supervisory control, steady-state control, and data acquisition.
• To provide an Operator Interface to all control system parameters.
• To allow for the management of alarms.
• To provide sequential control.

• Access to NSTX EPICS Data

To start the EPICS Display Manager from a computer on the general PPPL network:

1. If using a Windows PC you must install an X11 server such as eXceed or Cygwin/X.  UNIX and Macintosh computers with OS 10 have a native X server.

2. Start your x-server (X11 forwarding must be enabled), open a terminal window, and ssh to portal .

3. login using your personal (mail)  username and password .

4. From a 'terminal' window  type

• module load nstx/epics

• startmedm

4. View of Top-Level Display

5. The NSTX displays on portal are view-only, no control is possible.

To start the EPICS Display Manager from a computer on the NSTX Control Systems VLAN :

1. If using a Windows PC you must install an X11 server such as eXceed or Cygwin/X.  UNIX and Macintosh computers with OS 10 have a (native) X server.

2. Connect to host epicsrv using the ssh protocol.

3. login using the appropriate NSTX Operator username and password for your subsystem.

4. From a 'terminal' window  type startmedm. FCPC users may also use startfcpc

4. View of Top-Level Display

NSTX/EPICS Presentations

• NSTX Status (May 1999)

• Startup of the EPICS at NSTX (Oct. 1999)

• The NSTX Central Instrumentation & Control System (Oct. 1999)

• Overview of the NSTX Control System (Dec. 2001)

• Status of the EPICS at NSTX  (Jan. 2002)

• Integrating MDSplus and EPICS at NSTX  (July. 2005)

• NSTX Computing Overview  (presented at SNS/ORNL, Sep. 2005)

• NSTX Computing and Controls  (June, 2010)

Other Links

• NSTX Core Application Development Procedures

• NSTX EPICS Procedures Index

• EPICS Documentation via Argonne National Laboratory

• EPICS Collaboration Meetings

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Page edited 11Aug2011  by Paul Sichta [psichta@pppl.gov]