Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Rod Nussbaumer <[email protected]> · Fri, 10 May 2013 09:43:23 -0700

Hi all.

We are planning for installation of new beamlines requiring

approximately 130 magnet power supplies. The proposed supplies (a few

different manufacturers and models being considered) may be controlled

using VXI-11/Telnet style interfaces, and using SCPI style commands.

This implies the use of StreamDevice + Asyn interfaces in EPICS IOCs. My

concern is about the scalability of ssyn with the large number of TCP

connections to the power supplies. Each power supply will require an

asyn IP port to be maintained. Until now, I have only configured

asyn-based applications using 2 or 3 ports on a single IOC. This seems

like a significant departure from what I consider a conventional system.

The IOC platform would probably be a VME hosted CPU running Linux, with

an ethernet interface dedicated as a kind of VXI-11 fieldbus. It is

possible, or likely, that control of the 130 supplies will be spread

across 2 or 3 hardware IOC hosts.

Does anyone have any experience with this kind of configuration? Any

problems to anticipate? Any problems that have known solutions? I am

planning to try some kind of simulation using multiple physical hosts,

possibly using multiple virtual hosts on each. Each host/virtual-host

would simulate a power supply. Does this seem like a representative test?

Thanks.

Rod Nussbaumer
ISAC Controls, TRIUMF
Vancouver, Canada