Re: How is EPICS used at your facility?

[bob dalesio via Tech-talk <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>]

How it is used can be inferred by the version and clients tools in use.

Version 3, channel access protocol, time series archiver, alarm manager, are SCADA tools and can produce DCS steady state co n trol.

SNL, scan records, scan tool in CSStudio, are state transition control.

The areaDector package adds DAQ for NDimensional data.

Model Based Control is done in different ways bit Matlab Middle Layer Toolkit is a good example for this type of control.

The most recent improvements are in beam related instruments that are FPGA based with GHz sampling rates and feedback or machine protection in the few microseconds to 100s of microseconds limited by the length of fiber and time through fpga nodes. For accelerators and science this Isa game changer.

Epics 7 and the pvAccess protocol support these new instruments with aggregated data sets, ND Array, table, image and statistics. This supports scientific data acquisition for experimental data and AI/ML.

It is difficult to get good information from this query on specific sites. The web site for EPICS does not attempt to list all facilities or users. 

Good luck in your endeavor,

Bob

On Tue, Mar 14, 2023, 5:11 PM Leblanc, Gregory via Tech-talk <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov> wrote:

How do you use EPICS at your facility?  We aren't using it yet and I am trying to make some design decisions before I get very far down the implementation road.  The thread last week about SCAN issues and the archiver appliance brought some of these to mind.

How many data points do you collect?
How fast do you collect data?
Do you archive every datapoint you collect? 
Do you archive data slower than you collect it?
What are you using to archive data (EPICS Archiver Appliance, CSS, Phoebus, other?)?
How many IOCs do you have, and how do you decide when you need a new IOC vs extending an existing IOC?
What do you use for visualization (CSS, Phoebus, custom solution (based on qtepics?), something else)?

I'm sure I could come up with a dozen more questions about how EPICS is implemented, but maybe another time.
    Greg

P.S. If there's interest in collecting any of this data I could put together a survey and make the data available (Ohio has some decent survey data collection tools).

--
Gregory Leblanc
Accelerator Engineer
Edwards Accelerator Lab - Ohio University
123 University Terrace
Athens, OH 45701 USA
leblanc at ohio.edu
M: (401) 52-OUAL1 or (401) 526-8251