Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Kasemir, Kay via Tech-talk" <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov> · Wed, 15 Mar 2023 14:00:29 +0000

> What are you using to archive data (EPICS Archiver Appliance, CSS, Phoebus, other?)?

'Archive' tends to refer to a comparably slow and long-term process variable history. For example, temperatures or beam power that you log for years.

It's separate from experiment data acquisition where you sample something at a very high rate. You collect data for minutes to maybe a day. You then put all the data for one "sample" or for one "experiment" into one or few files. Solutions for DAQ tend to require specialized hardware, FPGA firmware. From the EPICS side, the area detector framework is often used as a starting point to interface DAQ.

For the long term archive, there are two generic solutions. The archive appliance uses a custom file format. It's fast, and many sites are very happy with it. The other approach uses a relational database (Oracle, MySQL, Postgres, TimescaleDB), which is slower, but you might benefit from the RDB ecosystem.

> What do you use for visualization (CSS, Phoebus, custom solution (based on qtepics?), something else)?

As for using MEDM, EDM, Eclipse-based CSS, the newer CSS, PyDm, caQtDm, ...: Whatever you pick now will look old in 10 years.  Your basic option are picking one tool, using it to the fullest, planning to stay with it for a long time by for example "freezing" OS updates or participating in the long-term maintenance of the tool, or picking one tool and using it lightly so that you can then translate your displays in 10 years to the next tool, not expecting them to look exactly the same but mostly "work" the same way.

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System