Central Services¶

Note

This document is a work in progress.

Gateway¶

Gateways provide a way for sub-systems to publish their internal PVs to higher layers in the DCS. In special cases, also reverse gateways may be provided to publish PVs from a higher layer to the sub-systems.

By default all PVs from a sub-system are filtered by the gateway and won’t be available to the higher layers. A list of PVs to be published by the gateway needs to be supplied by the sub-system.

In addition to filtering and publishing, the gateway also allows adding aliases to an original PV name. This is used in NUSTAR DCS

Networking¶

NUSTAR DCS will provide a campus-wide NUSTAR DCS VLAN.

Private subnets should be used in preference over the general GSI network wherever components of NUSTAR DCS are installed. Once in place, these should be connected via gateways to the main NUSTAR DCS VLAN.

Archiving¶

Values from the IOCs are logged and stored by central services. Two levels of logging are foreseen:

Sending PVs to the DAQ data stream via epics_collector
Archiving PVs to a database (InfluxDB ??)

If the second option is not ready in time, the legacy channel archiver will be used.

FESA access¶

Components of the NUSTAR DCS may profit from the availability of parameters in the accelerator control system. Many of these parameters are made available via FESA classes, and exposed by means of an HTTP/REST interface. Access to this interface is available in EPICS via the FESA IOC.

Documentation¶

Since good documentation is a central issue in a distributed system that is in use for many years, maintained by many different individuals, several means for documentation are provided and suggested by NUSTAR DCS. These should be used appropriately, frequently and thoroughly by the maintainers to ensure proper knowledge pooling and knowledge transfer.

Depending on the type of information, one of the following documentation tools should be chosen:

NUSTAR DCS documentation¶

General information on the NUSTAR DCS and its structure, guidelines, the supported hardware and other general pieces of information should be contained in this document.

GSI/FAIR EDMS @ CERN¶

The electronic document management system (EDMS) of CERN is used at GSI/FAIR to document many aspects of the project. Within NUSTAR it is foreseen to put any useful documentation regarding detectors into this EDMS. This documentation should be placed in the path (e.g. for R3B):

FAIR Collaborations -> NUSTAR -> Experiments -> R3B -> Detectors

The EDMS should be used also for temporary and otherwise volatile documentation.

Wiki¶

There is currently no Wiki.