Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Jeong Han Lee <[email protected]> · Mon, 11 Jan 2016 19:29:55 +0100

Hi Jeff, Bob, Martin, and Sonya,

   Thank you for your comments, and support. All information should be
extreme useful  for me.  BYW, I cannot choose MTCA4, which was done
before I joined to ESS. My first concern is to make them (shelf, power
module, MicroTCA carrier Hub, cooling units) as stable (maybe my old
friend VME crate?) as possible under EPICS environment, because I feel
uncomfortable when I am close to look at the MTCA concept (I may be
too stupid to understand  the modern advanced technology).

  I am not sure I can achieve that goal, but I am sure I could do my
best as always I did.

  Thank you everyone again.

  Thanks,
  Han

On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 6:49 PM, Hill, Jeff <[email protected]> wrote:
> Han,
>
> FWIW, LANL decided to go with 3U VPX instead of uTCA. We created a chassis design enclosing a 6 slot 3u VPX backplane, a 6u Compact PCI backplane, and also four 3u Compact PCI modular redundant power supplies. The VPX hosts the COTS Altera DSP boards with FMC mezzanine modular COTS ADC, and the Compact PCI hosts the analog cards, general purpose IO, and MRF timing etc. We interconnect the two backplanes with PCIe over cable standard. We run EPICS on FPGA embedded nios2 soft-cores running RTEMS. We have a presentation at the last ICALEPCS.
>
> Jeff
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]
>> On Behalf Of Sonya Hoobler
>> Sent: Monday, January 11, 2016 10:02 AM
>> To: [email protected]
>> Cc: Han Lee
>> Subject: Re: MTCA4 HW management
>>
>> Dear Han,
>>
>> In fact, SLAC does have a few MicroTCA systems. We did develop EPICS
>> monitoring for these systems, though it was never completed and still
>> contains some known bugs. This software discovers the shelf configuration
>> and monitors the shelf sensors.
>>
>> We plan to fix these early this year and to add support for some of our
>> other IPMI-based systems. We would be happy to share this code with you at
>> that time.
>>
>> Best regards,
>>    Sonya
>>
>> Sonya Hoobler
>> SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
>> Instrumentation and Controls Division
>>
>>
>> >
>> > On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 4:42 AM, Jeong Han Lee <[email protected]>
>> > wrote:
>> >
>> >> Hi all,
>> >>
>> >>   I am looking for any existent EPICS support of MicroTCA HW management
>> or
>> >> any plan for that. I've heard that SLAC and DESY heavily (?) use that
>> >> platform so far, but there are no EPICS related activities I can find in
>> >> teck-talks and others.
>> >>
>> >>   Currently, my concern is to to maintain all MTCA4 HW (Chassis, Carrier
>> >> Hub, Backplane, Power Modules, Cooling Units, etc), because MTCA.4 HW is
>> >> still unstable (I mean comparing with any VME HW (I might be wrong) and
>> ESS
>> >> will use several hundred MicroTCA Chassis (crate).
>> >>
>> >> This maintenance has the following activities:
>> >>
>> >>   * monitor/change a status of MicroTCA HW though EPICS
>> >>   * update/revert the corresponding firmware through EPICS
>> >>   * all activities are recorded into a EPICS archive service (AA) (it is
>> >> clear evidence with EPICS)
>> >>
>> >>   So, we can scale this activities up to massive MicroTCA HW easily.
>> >>
>> >>   Please let me know if you know much better idea than my naive one, and
>> >> would you recommend what you're using?
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>   Thanks,
>> >>   Han
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >
>

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System