Spring 2017 EPICS collabora@on mee@ng at KURRI / A. UCHIYAMA

Single board computers for EPICS IOC
and its reliability at RIKEN RIBF

RIKEN Nishina Center
Beam Dynamics & Diagnostics Team

Akito UCHIYAMA

mailto:a-uchi@riken.jp

2017/05/16

Spring 2017 EPICS collabora@on mee@ng at KURRI / A. UCHIYAMAOutline• Overview of RIBF
• Control system for RIBF
• PC Engines ALIX as EPICS IOC• Interface for maintenance• Shared ﬁle system• System load

• Future plan
• Summary

2017/05/16

Spring 2017 EPICS collabora@on mee@ng at KURRI / A. UCHIYAMAOverview of RIBF
RIBF = RI Beam Factory ProjectRILAC

AVF
RILAC2RRCSRCfRC

4 Ring Cyclotrons, 2 linear accelerators and AVF cyclotron.

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Spring 2017 EPICS collabora@on mee@ng at KURRI / A. UCHIYAMA

Overview of RIBF
Variable heavy ion beams have been provided for experiments.
l RIBF mode(RILAC2+RRC+fRC+IRC,SRC) have been provided* 238U, 124Xe, 48Ca, 70Zn beam = 345MeV/u.
ll

RILAC stand-alone mode have been provided* 50Ti, 51V, 48Ca, 27Al, 40Ar, 70Zn, 24Mg, and 22Ne beam < 6.6 MeV/u.

New chemical element Nihonium with symbol Nh and atomic
number 113, were discovered in RILAC of RIBF project.
RIKEN Linear Accelerator (RILAC)
Current status
O. Kamigaito, et al. Proc. of IPAC2016, Busan, Korea, P. 1281

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Spring 2017 EPICS collabora@on mee@ng at KURRI / A. UCHIYAMA

Control System for RIBF
RIBF control system is based on EPICS.
It covers* Magnet Control* Beam Diagnos@cs* ECR Ion Source Control* Vacuum Control* Beam Interlock System* Opera@onal Log system (Web)* Data archive system (PostgreSQL)* Management system (like IRMIS)* Alarm system (CSS/Beast)
CSS/BOY

Operator Interface

MEDM

Other services

EDM

Stand Alone Control System
・RF Control (Only monitor via EPICS)
・Radia@on Management System

NI/LabVIEW
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Spring 2017 EPICS collabora@on mee@ng at KURRI / A. UCHIYAMAControl System for RIBF
Number of all EPICS IOCs are 63 in 2017. The classiﬁca@on is ….
* Yokogawa FAM3-based F3RP61 Linux IOCs (Embedded) ✕ 17
* vxWorks IOCs (Embedded) ✕ 7* CAMAC-based embedded IOCs ✕ 6* x86 PC-based IOCs ✕ 230* Single board computer-based Linux IOCs (Sof IOC) ✕Single board computer* Nowadays, various kind of single board computers are u@lized as EPICS IOCs.
For examples )Beagle Borne Black [1]Raspberry Pi (Banana Pi) [2]Intel Edison [3]hmps://beagleboard.org/black

hmps://www.raspberrypi.org/* Original photo is References [3]

For RIBF control system, PC Engines ALIX series is adopted.
[1] Takashi Obina et al., Proc. PASJ2014, Aomori, Japan, P. 210.
[2] Y. S. Cheng et al., Proc. IPAC2016, Busan, Korea, P. 4122.
[3] D. Pedrel et al., Proc. ICALEPCS2015, Melbourne, Australia, P. 673.

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Spring 2017 EPICS collabora@on mee@ng at KURRI / A. UCHIYAMAPC Engines ALIX as EPICS IOC
For RIKEN RIBF, PC Engines WRAP (Wireless Router Applica@on Planorm) had already used since 2006 [4].

In 2007, it’s replaced with ALIX, which is next-genera@on model of WRAP.
WRAPALIX

1 year
CPU AMD Geode SC1100 233MHz
RAM 128MB

CPU AMD Geode LX 500MHzRAM 256MB

The characteris@cs of ALIX board are* Very low-cost (about 120US$)* Low-performance and low power consump@on* Fan less and hard disk less (Compact Flash is used)* x86 planorm (No cross-compile environment)* Running IOC automa@cally afer boo@ng[4] A. Uchiyama et al., Proc. ICALEPCS2007, Knoxville, Tennessee, USA. P. 334.

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Spring 2017 EPICS collabora@on mee@ng at KURRI / A. UCHIYAMAPC Engines ALIX as EPICS IOC

Ethernet Port ×2

Lineup of several types of ALIX board.
ALIX is available without system change,even the layers are separated by Ethernet
network.
Device interface layer

Presenta@on layer

Actually, this is u@lized for electron
cyclotron resonance ion source control
system[5] in injec@on into the AVFcyclotron.

[5] Makoto Nishimura et al., Proc. PASJ2014, Aomori, Japan, P. 660.
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Spring 2017 EPICS collabora@on mee@ng at KURRI / A. UCHIYAMAPC Engines ALIX as EPICS IOC
Purpose of adop@ng ALIX IOC is for introducing of…

* Easy maintenance system* High durability system

Because it’s diﬃcult to implement many PC-based IOCs without hardware
troubles for long term.

In many cases, power supply, hard disk and fan will cause hardware troubles.

So, ALIX is suitable for EPICS IOC from the view point of reliability.

Actually, no hardware trouble about ALIX for 10 years !!
2017/05/16

Spring 2017 EPICS collabora@on mee@ng at KURRI / A. UCHIYAMAPC Engines ALIX as EPICS IOC
No hardware trouble about ALIX for 10 years, however …
* 2 AC adapters was broken 8 years later fromthe implementa@on.

Therefore,* All AC adapters should be changed in maintenanceperiodically (5 years ?).

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Spring 2017 EPICS collabora@on mee@ng at KURRI / A. UCHIYAMAPC Engines ALIX as EPICS IOC
Using a method of Linux from Scratch (LFS), minimized Linux for
running EPICS IOC is constructed.
* For compensate for the low performance. (500MHz single core, 256MB memory)* LFS is to build own Linux from kernel source and the necessary packages.
* Packages :Linux kernel, glibc, BusyBox, Apache, bash, telnetd, NTP, PHP,
libncurses, libreadline, libstdc++,and etc.

EPICS sofware* Base(R3.14), AsynDriver, StreamDevice, NetDev, AutoSave, Sequencer* EPICS sofware is stored into shared ﬁle system.

ALIX IOCs manage over 400 network-based devices.
* Programmable Logic Controller : (Yokogawa, MELSEC, OMRON)* N-DIM (Original designed by RIKEN Nishina Center)* Other network-based devices (RF ampliﬁer, Data Logger, and etc)
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Spring 2017 EPICS collabora@on mee@ng at KURRI / A. UCHIYAMAInterface for maintenance
For maintenance, simple Web applica@on like commercially network router isimplemented.
By using Web applica@on, we can handle …
* Restar@ng IOC (authen@ca@on is needed).
* Conﬁgura@on of IP address, hostname, DNS, and etc (authen@ca@on is needed).
* Watching the running IOC process on the terminal (startup script).

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Spring 2017 EPICS collabora@on mee@ng at KURRI / A. UCHIYAMA

Shared ﬁle system
As shared ﬁle system, NetApp FAS2240 (NAS) with redundancy is u@lized.

* For development, the program is compiled on other Linux server (SC4.X),and it’s shared with ALIX board.
* ALIX has read-only local ﬁle system (CF), so AutoSave data is stored into NAS.

Scien@ﬁc Linux 4.x

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Spring 2017 EPICS collabora@on mee@ng at KURRI / A. UCHIYAMA

System load
Low-cost and low-performance board, but enough* The system load average is recorded by MySQL-based logger system.
* For example, 47 network-based devices are managed by one ALIX IOC, for beam
posi@on monitor…

The load average for one monthis more or less than 1.0.

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Spring 2017 EPICS collabora@on mee@ng at KURRI / A. UCHIYAMA

System load
Measures against system load
* In case of RIBF opera@on, caPut access is not increased dras@cally.
* PV gateway is installed as a CA proxy for monitoring system.
IOCIOCPV gateway

Opera@onal Log
SystemMonitoring
SystemIOC
caPut
Opera@on
export EPICS_CA_ADDR_LIST=“IOC host”
export EPICS_CA_AUTO_ADDR_LIST=“NO”

Web-basedSystem

export EPICS_CA_ADDR_LIST=“PV gateway host”
export EPICS_CA_AUTO_ADDR_LIST=“NO”

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Spring 2017 EPICS collabora@on mee@ng at KURRI / A. UCHIYAMAFuture plan
We can buy the next-genera@on single board computer of ALIX.
APU2

ALIX

10 years
CPU AMD Geode LX 500MHzRAM 256MB
CPU AMD Geode Embedded GX-412TC, 1GHz Quad CoreRAM 2GB or 4GB* Original photo is https://www.pcengines.ch/apu3a4.htm* From the hardware speciﬁcation of APU2, the distribution (CentOS, Ubuntu, etc)
will be used instead of minimized Linux using LFS.

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Spring 2017 EPICS collabora@on mee@ng at KURRI / A. UCHIYAMA

Summary* In RIBF control system, PC Engines ALIX, which isa single board computer is utilized as EPICS IOC
for network-based devices. (vs Virtual IOC ?)* 30 ALIX IOCs manages about 400 network devices.
* For 10 years, ALIX single board computer
didn't has hardware trouble.

Thank you for your amen@on

2017/05/16