1. NICOS – IBEX Interactions
Dominic Oram – ISIS

2. NICOS – IBEX Interactions
Overview of IBEX
Scripting in IBEX
Evaluation of different script servers
Integration of NICOS into IBEX
Future Improvements

3. IBEX New ISIS beamline control system
Moves towards a more distributed, client/server architecture
Based on EPICS and CS-Studio
Run entirely on Windows
Now on 12/30 instruments

4. IBEX IBEX has been fully functional control system for 3-4 years
Allows users to:
Configure which devices are on the beamline
Tag PVs to store in the NeXus file, set archive rates etc. on these
Set variables via CS-Studio OPIs or a scripting language
Begin/end data collection
Much more…
Work now focused on migrating new instruments and ‘would like to have’ features

5. Scripting Instrument Control in IBEX
Scripting is in Python (2.7)
In-house genie_python module allows instrument control
Scripting is done client side and communicates with the server via channel access
Run using pyDev in the GUI or as a standalone Python console

6. What do Users Want? Accountability of who ran what when
Guarantee of what script is controlling the instrument
Be able to queue scripts overnight
A view of what line of a script is currently being run
The ability to pause/stop and edit scripts on the fly
Validation and time estimates of a script
More varied methods of creating scripts (drag-and-drop)
All this in the pre-existing IBEX client
Better separation of client and server (maybe more of a developer want)
Some of these things don’t require a server but come with script server packages

7. SNS Scan Server Evaluation
Meets all user criteria
Java and Eclipse RCP based script server
Fixed set of commands that are hardcoded between client/server (or arbitrary Jython)
Easy to integrate UI
XML comms protocol

8. NICOS Meets all user criteria
Python based back-end (easy to integrate genie_python)
Protocol is pickled python over sockets
Needed to write a new UI (in Java) and change protocol to better integrate with Java
Only need the daemon
Basically choice between re implementing a backend or a frontend

9. First Integration Attempt - Proxy
Prototype - didn’t want to modify NICOS too much
Communicated with client using JSON over ActiveMQ queues (both already in use in IBEX)
Converted to pickled python for NICOS
We wanted to evaluate the possibility of using NICOS without modifying it too much
Building this confirmed that NICOS was a viable option

10. A Better Integration Attempt
Met with FRM-II February 2017
They modified NICOS to allow an option for JSON serialization over ZeroMQ
JSON and ZeroMQ have good Java support
Meant we could remove proxy and move forward with creating a prototype UI

11. Demo of Current Functionality

12. Current Rollout Status
Have demoed functionality to about half of the IBEX users so far
NICOS is being rolled out to all IBEX instruments as we speak
Will be enabled as default but can turn it off at scientists request
Old scripting method is still available and will be for the foreseeable future
Will be gathering usage statistics and asking for feedback at the end of the month

13. What do Users Want? Accountability of who ran what when
Guarantee of what script is controlling the instrument
Be able to queue scripts overnight
A view of what line of a script is currently being run
The ability to pause/stop and edit scripts on the fly
Validation and time estimates of a script
More varied methods of creating scripts (drag-and-drop)
All this in the pre-existing IBEX client
Better separation of client and server (maybe more of a developer want)
Green we can do, orange we’re a step closer to

14. Things to do Integrate better with NICOS repository
Improve authentication
Tie security into our EPICS security
Further UI improvements – code completion etc.
Implement dry run functionality into UI and genie_python
Think about how we want to interact with old style scripting
Minor feedback e.g. get name of current script
Look into using other NICOS features
Build a script generator that interacts with NICOS
Currently all clients use the same account and control is locked to localhost

15. Thank You
Any Questions?