Presentazione, 2019, ENG

MARTe2 and MDSplus integration for a comprehensive Fast Control and Data Acquisition System

Manduchi G.; Rigoni A.; Fredian T.; Stillerman J.; Neto A.; Sartori F.

CNR ISTP, Istituto per la Scienza e Tecnologia dei Plasmi, Sede di Padova, Italy; Consorzio RFX (CNR, ENEA, INFN, Università di Padova, Acciaierie Venete SpA), Padova, Italy; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA; Fusion for Energy, Barcelona, Spain.

MARTe is a framework for real-time control that has been used in several fusion experiments. Re-cently, a new version named MARTe2 has been developed adhering to software quality standards.The framework supervises data movement and component interaction in real-time and is based onconfiguration information specifying the involved threads, the computation and the data manage-ment components. MDSplus is a data system widely adopted in the fusion community. MDS plus provides fast data acquisition and access to pulse files and is intended to provide a complete interfaceboth for the configuration of the experiment and the experimental results.MDSplus and MARTe2 are already integrated via a set of components that are able to (1) store adata stream originated in real-time in the pulse file, (2) get experiment set-up information, such asreference waveforms, from the pulse file to be used afterwards in real-time, (3) synchronize MARTe2components with other MDSplus components via MDSplus events. Even though the use of the abovethree components covers all the needed requirement for the integration of fast control and data ac-quisition, further integration is desirable. In particular, the configuration of MARTe2 applicationsis based on a very flexible set of components, either specified in a configuration file, or created onthe fly by a supervisory application. Adhering to the MDSplus design pattern that states that allthe configuration information should be specified inside the pulse file template, called ExperimentModel, it is possible to store configuration information in the experiment model together with theother experiment configuration parameters in order to let a given pulse file fully describe the associated experiment, including its configuration. A better integration is proposed here, that is, usingthe Device abstraction provided by MDSplus to specify the components involved in the data acqui-sition process and MDSplus expressions to specify data relationships, in order to describe also thereal-time components and the associated data flow. Following this approach, the whole real-time configuration would be described exactly as the rest of the other non real-time data acquisition com-ponents. All the required MARTe2 configuration information would be exposed to users via theconfiguration fields of the associated MDSplus devices, for which graphical interfaces can be readilydeveloped using the MDSplus Java Beans framework. Once the real-time components and the asso-ciated data flow have been described in the MDSplus experiment model, the corresponding MARTe2 configuration will be generated on the fly, integrating all the required consistency checks. Besides exposing to users a much less complicated and more intuitive configuration interface, theproposed approach minimizes the possible errors that could arise from a manual specification of theMARTe2 configuration that, when expressed via a text file, can be composed of thousands of lines fora non trivial configuration. A use case involving EQUINOX equilibrium computation in a MARTe2application, currently used in simulation, but adaptable for real-time control will be presented todemonstrate the feasibility and the advantages of the proposed approach.

12th IAEA Technical Meeting on Control, Data Acquisition, and Remote Participation for Fusion Research (IAEA TM CODAC 2019), Daejeon, Republic of Korea (South Korea), May 13-17, 2019

Keywords

Plasma Control

CNR authors

Manduchi Gabriele

CNR institutes

ISTP – Istituto per la Scienza e Tecnologia dei Plasmi