EPICS - Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System at GSI

EPICS (Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System) is a widely used scalable control system. At GSI the HADES group uses EPICS since its startup [1]. In order to build a GSI wide knowledge base on EPICS some other projects than HADES are started. For example FOPI is a nice target for different controls developments like the LabView based CS [2] and EPICS. For the FUTURE DAQ project of CBM and the HADES tdc readout board an “embedded” EPICS will be ported to these embedded boards. EPICS a small introduction EPICS is an open source control system framework which allows to build huge distributed control systems. It can run on several OSs (operating systems) like Linux, Vxworks (originally developed on this OS), RTEMS (A real time OS), and Windows. The communication is based on the channel access (CA) protocol using Ethernet as transport layer. The IOC (Input Output Controller) is the application which provides process variables (PV) via CA. Once a PV is published it is network wide visible. EPICS gives the freedom to use any CA client to display the acquired data. As a default solution MEDM (Motif Editor and Display Manager) is at the moment used at GSI. But in the near future other means of displaying CA data will be tested. Any other service than displaying, like archiving, histograming, and alarm handling are available as CA clients. These tools can be found at the central webpage [3]. EPICS is fully documented and available on the world wide web. In addition to that the very active email list “tech-talk” gives access to the wide knowledge of the worldwide EPICS users. For the first start reference [3] is the best starting point to evaluate EPICS. In order to have access to EPICS from all computers, a GSI wide installation was initiated on linux. A detailed HowTo is available at [4]. All experiment groups are invited to test EPICS for their setup.