1. Instituto de Plasmas e Fusão Nuclear Instituto Superior Técnico Lisbon, Portugal http://www.ipfn.ist.utl.pt B. Gonçalves | Beijing, May 11, 2009 | RT2009 ATCA Advanced Control and Data acquisition systems for fusion experiments Bruno Soares Gonçalves, J. Sousa, A. Batista, R. Pereira, M. Correia, A. Neto, B. Carvalho, H. Fernandes, C.A.F. Varandas

2. Author’s name | Place, Month xx, 2007 | EventB. Gonçalves | Beijing, May 11, 2009 | RT2009 2 Large-scale experiments: control and data aquisition challenges The next generation of physics experiments will –be highly complex –raise new challenges in the field of control and automation systems –demand well integrated, interoperable set of tools with a high degree of automation –deliver and process data at a rate of up to hundred GBytes/s. –deploy and integrate systems with different degrees of complexity and provenience

3. Author’s name | Place, Month xx, 2007 | EventB. Gonçalves | Beijing, May 11, 2009 | RT2009 3 Are they any different from commercial systems ? Although sharing a large degree of architectural commonality, given their unique requirements, traditionally, such systems have been purpose built –significantly greater amount of I/O capability required between computational elements –unique and disparate I/O requirements imposed on their interfaces R&D targeting –Self-triggered front-end electronics with adequate output bandwidth and data processing –MIMO controllers with efficient resource sharing between control tasks on the same unit –Massive parallel computing capabilities. Large-scale experiments: control and data aquisition systems Commercial technology will likely meet the basic requirements on which physics experiments can leverage for building future control systems

4. Author’s name | Place, Month xx, 2007 | EventB. Gonçalves | Beijing, May 11, 2009 | RT2009 4 However… future systems are envisioned to be more than an order of magnitude larger than those of today More challenging will be… providing a robust, fault tolerant, reliable, maintainable, secure and operable control systems Large-scale experiments: control and data aquisition (more) challenges

5. Author’s name | Place, Month xx, 2007 | EventB. Gonçalves | Beijing, May 11, 2009 | RT2009 5 Is ITER any different? ITER CODAC is a challenging endeavour... (as shown this morning in PL2-2 – ITER CODAC status and implementation plan, W.-D Klotz et al.) ITER will generate a huge quantity of experimental data –150 plant systems –1 000 000 diagnostic channels –300 000 slow control channels – 5 000 fast control channels –40 CODAC systems –5 Gb/s data –3Pb/year data ( e.g. 12 IR cameras in a 10 minutes discharge: 1.728 Tbytes ) In addition... ITER will require a far higher level of availability and reliability than previous/existing tokamaks.

6. Author’s name | Place, Month xx, 2007 | EventB. Gonçalves | Beijing, May 11, 2009 | RT2009 6 Control and data acquisition in fusion: Vertical Stabilization as example Fusion machines have a wide range of Plasma Control Systems To reach and reproduce scenarios which cannot be programmed To protect Plasma and Machine e.g. Elongated plasmas are vertically unstable Loss of control if plasma reaches the vessel protecting tiles. Dedicated MIMO systems are designed to make the plasma vertically stable so that other controllers can successfully control the plasma position and shape. For JET example: CMS2-2 and FESPP-25 at this conference From R. Felton, JET RT Workshop, 2005 From F. Sartori, IEEE CONTROL SYSTEMS MAGAZINE, APRIL 2006

7. Author’s name | Place, Month xx, 2007 | EventB. Gonçalves | Beijing, May 11, 2009 | RT2009 7 Control and data acquisition in fusion: ITER Vertical Position Control Loss of vertical plasma position control in ITER will cause thermal loads on Plasma Facing Components of 30-60 MJ/m 2 for ~0.1s. –PFCs cannot be designed to sustain such (repetitive) thermal loads VDE also generates the highest electromagnetic loads –A phenomenological extrapolation of horizontal forces from worst JET cases implies horizontal loads ~45MN on ITER vacuum vessel. –MHD wetted kink model developed to simulate the horizontal loads predicts ~20MN –Vertical loads ~90MN Plasma vertical position in ITER must be robust & reliable to ensure a vertical plasma position control loss is a very unlikely event

8. Author’s name | Place, Month xx, 2007 | EventB. Gonçalves | Beijing, May 11, 2009 | RT2009 8 Vertical Stabilization: how to design an ITER relevant MIMO architecture? Aim at reduction of –The loop delay on the signal acquisition/generation endpoints (down to 10 µs) –The data interconnect links from and to the processing unit –the analogue signal path (analogue filters); High processing power –on the acquisition/generator endpoints –on the system controller; –For the improvement of MIMO algorithm performance Synchronization of all digitizer/generator endpoints; Architecture designed for maintainability, upgradeability and scalability; Low cost per channel; Low risk of implementation and testing.

9. Author’s name | Place, Month xx, 2007 | EventB. Gonçalves | Beijing, May 11, 2009 | RT2009 9 ATCA: a possible solution ATCA is the most promising architecture to substantially enhance the performance and capability of existing standard systems (e.g. VME) It is designed to handle tasks such as –event building, –feature extraction –high level trigger processing. –TeraOPS of processing power in a single sub-rack. First commercial open standard designed for –high throughput –High availability High interest to data acquisition physics and attractive for experiments requiring a very high up-time

10. Author’s name | Place, Month xx, 2007 | EventB. Gonçalves | Beijing, May 11, 2009 | RT2009 10 Why ATCA? ATCA platform is gaining traction in the physics community because of Advanced communication bus architecture (serial gigabit replacing parallel buses) very high data throughput options and its suitability for real-time applications Scalable system availability to 99.999% High levels of modularity and configurability The ability to host large pools of DSPs, NPs, processors and storage High security and regulatory conformance Reliable, full redundancy support Hardware management interface More details: TCA-1 to TCA-5 at this conference

11. Author’s name | Place, Month xx, 2007 | EventB. Gonçalves | Beijing, May 11, 2009 | RT2009 11 Does it work? ATCA @ JET Vertical Stabilization Front viewRear view 192 input signals

12. Author’s name | Place, Month xx, 2007 | EventB. Gonçalves | Beijing, May 11, 2009 | RT2009 12 ATCA @ JET Vertical Stabilization: “the star of the show” IPFN’s ATCA-MIMO-ISOL See FESPSS-25 at this conference

13. Author’s name | Place, Month xx, 2007 | EventB. Gonçalves | Beijing, May 11, 2009 | RT2009 13 Does it work? VS Controler in action@JET 192 signals acquired by ADCs and transferred at each loop 50  s control loop cycle time with jitters < 1  s Always in real-time (24 hours per day) 1.728 x 10 9 50  s cycles/day Crucial for ITER very long pulses

14. Author’s name | Place, Month xx, 2007 | EventB. Gonçalves | Beijing, May 11, 2009 | RT2009 14 ATCA for real-time data processing:  -ray spectroscopy as example Intelligent modules (with FPGAs) are used for real time pulse processing: Pulse height analyzer; Pile-up rejection; and Pulse shape discriminator Digitizer modules centered around an FPGA, which: provides the gigabit interconnections runs DSP algorithms Concurrent algorithms can be implemented on the FPGA and each one can be parallelized (e.g. 4 pipes at 250 MSPS ≡ 1 GSPS with reduced ENOB ~10-bit) Data reduction rate of at least 80% attainable with pulse height analysis Data transfer rate of up to 800 Mbyte/s over x4 PCI Express to the host processor. Choice of resolution 250 MSPS @ 13-bit, 400 MSPS @ 14-bit, 500 MSPS @ 12-bit Maximum pulse rate of 5 Mpulse/s; See TDAP-11 at this conference

15. Author’s name | Place, Month xx, 2007 | EventB. Gonçalves | Beijing, May 11, 2009 | RT2009 15 ITER High performance Plant System: possible implementation Multicore processor controller ATCA ADC/DAC/DIO boards with MIMO capability at different data rates Programming tools Local control and autonomous operation Local data storage Timing, (synchronous) messages and high performance network interfaces ATCA will add the required robustness to the platform

16. Author’s name | Place, Month xx, 2007 | EventB. Gonçalves | Beijing, May 11, 2009 | RT2009 16 Who could benefit from it? Accelerators and Detectors Fusion Reactors and Experiments Light sources and Experiments Astrophysics Instruments and Experiments Astronomy Instruments and Experiments Medical Imaging Instruments and Experiments Nuclear Physics Instruments and Experiments But, vertical solutions of great complexity are only a subset of the potential market ATCA is suitable for horizontal Control and Data Acquisition solutions

17. Author’s name | Place, Month xx, 2007 | EventB. Gonçalves | Beijing, May 11, 2009 | RT2009 17 Who else is using ATCA? The group of experimenters includes several major laboratories representing different fields of use and a range of applications. Active programs are showing up most notably at –DESY (for XFEL, see TCA-2) and JET Other laboratories –ILC, IHEP, KEK, SLAC (see TCA-1), FNAL, ANL, BNL, FAIR, ATLAS at CERN, AGATA, large telescopes, Ocean Observatories Investigating ATCA solutions for future upgrades –Both the CMS and ATLAS detectors Setting up prototype experiments to test its potential –ILC and ITER (see PL2-2) ATCA is being adapted without significant change as a platform for generic data acquisition processors requiring high throughput and bandwidth. Most of these programmes put the emphasis on High Availability

18. Author’s name | Place, Month xx, 2007 | EventB. Gonçalves | Beijing, May 11, 2009 | RT2009 18 “These days, building the best system isn’t enough. That’s the price of entry.” Ann Livermore, HP In fusion, as in other fields, the remaining price should be paid on… robustness fault tolerance reliability maintainability Security operability ATCA fits the bill! Closing remarks

19. Author’s name | Place, Month xx, 2007 | EventB. Gonçalves | Beijing, May 11, 2009 | RT2009 19 All this seems really interesting… RT2009