Online Control Program: a summary of recent discussions R. Fantechi 8/2/2012

Kick-off meeting Held on Jan 16th, via EVO People from NA62 and EN/ICE Following a first meeting (Riccardo, Marco, Valeri, Ferdi) with EN/ICE (Manuel Gonzalez, Fernando Varela) EN/ICE willing to provide expertise, but dedicated manpower from NA62 needed A first implementation with maybe reduced functionality for July List of requirements extracted from note NA62-11-02 + added informations Nicholas Lurkin from Louvain will work on the CP. Needs to become expert, i.e. through standard EN/ICE courses Description of the NA48 Control Program functionality demande to a discussion between EN/ICE and myself The scope was extended to let myself learn what LHCB is doing

The NA48 control architecture - 1 Hardware VME single board computers + Ethernet Separate data and control path One case for a PC (farm control) as control equipment Finite state machine Run states handled by the so called “harness”, a process in each control machine Receives state changes from the Control Program Executes user defined programs for any state change Maintains the integrity of the states Communication Message passing through ControlHost (developed by Maslennikov and Gurin) Similar to DIM, used in LHCB and in PVSS control systems

The NA48 control architecture - 2 Control program Implemented with a TCL/TK scripts Both state machine and GUI Run database implemented as an ASCII file, later transformed into HTML Interface to the configuration database Simple definition of states, forming a cycle Idle, Init, Ready, Running, EndRun, Terminate Configuration database Implemented with Objectivity (overkill…) Configuration files from the DB read at initialization time through a GUI started by the CP The files for the selected configuration sent to a common NFS mounted area where they were read by the various SBCs during the init phase Messaging Use of EMU to centralize message handling/display This list defines the basic requirements of NA62 too

The LHCB control suite - 1 Components A run control machine running PVSS and SMI++ A number (~40) of control PCs with PVSS and SMI++ to control the Event Filter Farm The large number of PCs allows to slice the farm in sub-farms which could be allocated to different sources if the readout is partitioned Similar PCs for each detector Sometimes one PC for multiple detectors They have LHCB specific PVSS components to interface the CCPC for TELL1 configuration (via a DIM server on CCPC) Different type of hardware (i.e. VME/Cream) could be handled with the same generic mechanism, where the server is run on a PC linked to the VME system Similar PCs for storage and trigger control All these computers are linked via PVSS distribution mechanism. Error/info messages handling is embedded in PVSS

The LHCB control suite - 2 Configuration Configuration data stored on Oracle DB A PVSS interface called “Hardware tool” to handle these data GUI to define all the boards/registers One to one mapping of TELxx registers to PVSS data points The specific PVSS components for the TELxx handle automatically the retrieval of data at init time A lot of optimization done to speed up operations… Run control The same kind of states as in NA48 Integrated environment It also allows for partitioning of the readout with concurrent operations of different sub-detectors in stand-alone mode

Control program for NA62 LHCB stuff could be reused It needs customization, I am not able to quantify how much Needs a detailed analysis with EN/ICE Possible scenario 1 run control machine 1 farm control machine (could include storage) Need to partition the farm? 1 or few PC for the detectors, running multiple instances of PVSS projects With interface to TEL62, Cream control, GTK control? The Oracle database

An alternative? Clone the NA48 model implementing it with new technologies Use of DIM State machine handling to be written Adapt harness scheme? Which kind of GUI? Handling configurations Not easy to evaluate pro/cons EN/ICE expert consultancy will probably drop PVSS licensing will be simpler (only DCS) More effort on our side? Code maintenance problems However keep in mind that a LHCB-like solution will imply some more strict maintenance of the operating system to follow upgrades in PVSS, which could also affect LHCB specific components