Old Wine in New Bottles-The SPEAR Control System Upgrade

摘要

The control systems for the SPEAR storage ring and injector were designed almost two decades ago and have worked reliably for us. Both systems are heavily dependent on the OpenVMS operating system and CAMAC. The realtime data reside in shared memory on a single computer for each control system. In order to use more modern client tools while preserving our investment in the hardware and software, we have installed an EPICS Portable Channel Access Server (CAS) on the control computers. The CAS will serve the existing realtime data as EPICS Process Variables (PVs) and allow us to use client tools like dm2k and IDL running on other workstations to more easily build new operator interfaces and develop accelerator physics programs. The CAS will also provide the infrastructure to help integrate new hardware controlled by EPICS Input/Output Controllers (IOCs).