Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Shen, Guobao" <[email protected]> · Fri, 11 May 2018 16:51:57 +0000

Hi Gedare,
The EPICS Core development and application development are different, although they are related of course.
It seems that as the first step, you want to focus on the application side, therefore some soft IOC and simulators like areaDetector simulator would be a good start.
You can definitely use simDetector to test your network performance, which gives you a reasonable frame per second depending on your server.
Another advantage of simDetector is that it supports both CA and PVA, therefore you can test both CA and PVA performance.

For the IO testing, unless you want to use some real hardware, you can use simulators which could give you same responses like your hardware.
It is fairly easy to develop one if you are using asyn for your hardware IOC. We have some preliminary hardware simulators at APS for our ASYN based IOCs.
Of course, virtual accelerator is also one of nice tool for your evaluation.

Thanks,
Guobao

On 5/11/18, 10:33 AM, "[email protected] on behalf of Gedare Bloom" <[email protected] on behalf of [email protected]> wrote:

    Hi Mark,

    Thanks for your input, that is great to know and answers one of my
    questions. I will definitely start with the simDetector to test the
    network side and use softIOCs for initial development and testing. I
    will still need some typical hardware to develop, debug, and evaluate
    RTOS hardening aspects such as memory protection that rely on
    existence, or non-existence, of memory management unit (MMU) or memory
    protection unit (MPU) in the IOC processor. Realistic performance
    evaluation will also need either time-accurate processor simulators or
    real hardware. Network performance evaluation of any enhancements to
    CA or other protocols might also motivate hardware measurement in the
    future.

    Gedare

    On Fri, May 11, 2018 at 11:17 AM, Mark Engbretson
    <[email protected]> wrote:
    >
    > You can set up any number of softIOC's or even build the stand alone Area Detector simDetector as a known to be working environment to test (network) security hardening.  Why would you even need real hardware? That isn't what your testing.
    >
    > That is probably one of the simplest real world examples to use  for testing as it is also a configuration that you can impact/crash by doing net scans across open ports.
    >
    >
    >
    > -----Original Message-----
    > From: [email protected] <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Gedare Bloom
    > Sent: Friday, May 11, 2018 9:48 AM
    > To: Talk EPICS Tech <[email protected]>
    > Subject: benchtop testbeds for EPICS development and testing?
    >
    > Hello folks,
    >
    > I'm wondering if anyone has advice about a good set of hardware/software for a small testbed to develop/debug EPICS (core)?
    > Alternately, if you have a reasonably generic method for EPICS development, I would be interested to know about it. This is in relation to planning my security hardening project, which will focus on EPICS 7.0+.
    >
    > I'm interested in generally well-used IOCs that are supported by multiple OS targets, commonly used networking hardware (Serial+VME?) or Industry Packs, and a small, safe control application or simulator (virtual LINAC demo?).  I would like to cover all the supported OS targets with some common hardware that is still commercially available.
    >
    > Gedare
    >

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System