Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

(Hopefully this attaches to the correct discussion – I just joined the list)

Hello Giles, All -

At Fermilab we are incrementally adopting EPICS, and we are very interested in:

• Creating a Generic IOC (see below)
• Containerizing instances of these IOC’s with docker/podman
• Managing deployment with Kubernetes

For us (in my department, not lab-wide), a Generic IOC will be a soft IOC that uses middleware (Kafka, Redis) to exchange data and messages with a simple embedded Linux node at the device hardware.

So for us, a Generic IOC will always run on a Linux and will have no hardware interface, they will just talk to Redis via Ethernet.  We hope to just parameterize them with a configuration file – that file being the only difference between any two deployed instances.  We will try to support any sophistication at the highest level we can (stateful behavior, message queuing, data reformulation) for sake of visibility and troubleshooting, as performance allows.  This may mean trying to implement such features in the Generic IOC in a generic way, that just gets parameterized via the config.  I’m not optimistic about that part being easy, however…

I’m looking forward to exploring your work on github, and I hope we can share knowledge and experiences.

Dave Bracey

Fermilab AD Instrumentation

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

Batavia, IL - USA