TY - CONF AU - Cuní, G. AU - Matilla, O. AU - Nicolàs, J. AU - Pont, M. ED - Schaa, Volker RW ED - Götz, Andy ED - Venter, Johan ED - White, Karen ED - Robichon, Marie ED - Rowland, Vivienne TI - A Successful Emergency Response Plan: Lessons in the Controls Section of the ALBA Synchrotron J2 - Proc. of ICALEPCS2023, Cape Town, South Africa, 09-13 October 2023 CY - Cape Town, South Africa T2 - International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems T3 - 19 LA - english AB - These are challenging times for research institutes in the field of software engineering. Our designs are becoming increasingly complex, and a software engineer needs years of experience to become productive. On the other hand, the software job market is very dynamic, and a computer engineer receives tens of offers from private companies with attractive salaries every year. Occasionally, the perfect storm can occur, and in a short period of time, several key people in a group with years of experience leave. The situation is even more critical when the institute is plunged into a high growth rate with several new instruments under way. Naturally, engaged teams will resist reducing operational service quality, but, on the other hand, the new installations milestones dates will approach quickly. This article outlines the decision-making process and the measures taken to cope with this situation in the ALBA Synchroton’s Controls Section. The plan included reorganizing teamwork, but more importantly, redefining the relationship with our clients and prioritization processes. As a result, the team was restructured and new roles were created. In addition, effective coordination was vital, and new communication channels were established to ensure smooth workflows. The emergency peak period is over in our case, but we have learned a lot of lessons and implemented many changes that will stay with us. They have made us more efficient and more resilient in case of future emergencies. PB - JACoW Publishing CP - Geneva, Switzerland SP - 316 EP - 320 KW - controls KW - operation KW - software KW - MMI KW - synchrotron DA - 2024/02 PY - 2024 SN - 2226-0358 SN - 978-3-95450-238-7 DO - doi:10.18429/JACoW-ICALEPCS2023-TU2AO03 UR - https://jacow.org/icalepcs2023/papers/tu2ao03.pdf ER - TY - CONF AU - Rubio-Manrique, S. AU - Becheri, F. AU - Cuní, G. AU - Homs, R.H. AU - Reszela, Z. ED - Schaa, Volker RW ED - Götz, Andy ED - Venter, Johan ED - White, Karen ED - Robichon, Marie ED - Rowland, Vivienne TI - Preliminary Design for the ALBA II Control System Stack J2 - Proc. of ICALEPCS2023, Cape Town, South Africa, 09-13 October 2023 CY - Cape Town, South Africa T2 - International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems T3 - 19 LA - english AB - One of the main pillars of the ALBA Synchrotron Light Source (Barcelona, Spain) Strategy Plan is the preparation of ALBA to be upgraded to a fourth-generation light source. To accomplish this, a preliminary design of the accelerator has already been initiated in 2021. On the Computing side, the upgrade of the accelerator will require a comprehensive overhaul of most parts of the Control System, DAQ, Timing, and many other systems as well as DevOps strategies. This need for a major redesign will bring new architectural challenges, and opportunities to benefit from new technologies that were not present at the time ALBA was designed and build. This paper presents the preliminary design studies, pilot projects, new approaches to development coordination and management, and the preparation plan to acquire the knowledge and experience needed to excel in the ALBA II Control System Stack design. PB - JACoW Publishing CP - Geneva, Switzerland SP - 685 EP - 690 KW - controls KW - TANGO KW - hardware KW - GUI KW - software DA - 2024/02 PY - 2024 SN - 2226-0358 SN - 978-3-95450-238-7 DO - doi:10.18429/JACoW-ICALEPCS2023-TUPDP076 UR - https://jacow.org/icalepcs2023/papers/tupdp076.pdf ER - TY - CONF AU - Matilla, O. AU - Avila-Abellan, J.A. AU - Becheri, F. AU - Blanch-Torné, S. AU - Burillo, A.M. AU - Camps Gimenez, A. AU - Costa, I. AU - Cuní, G. AU - Fernández Maltas, T. AU - Homs, R.H. AU - Moldes, J. AU - Morales, E. AU - Pascual-Izarra, C. AU - Pusó Gallart, S. AU - Pérez Font, A. AU - Reszela, Z. AU - Revuelta, B. AU - Rubio, A. AU - Rubio-Manrique, S. AU - Salabert, J. AU - Serra, N. AU - Serra-Gallifa, X. AU - Soler, N. AU - Vicente Molina, S. AU - Villanueva, J. ED - Schaa, Volker RW ED - Götz, Andy ED - Venter, Johan ED - White, Karen ED - Robichon, Marie ED - Rowland, Vivienne TI - Towards the ALBA II : the Computing Division Preliminary Study J2 - Proc. of ICALEPCS2023, Cape Town, South Africa, 09-13 October 2023 CY - Cape Town, South Africa T2 - International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems T3 - 19 LA - english AB - The ALBA Synchrotron has started the work for up-grading the accelerator and beamlines towards a 4th gen-eration source, the future ALBA II, in 2030. A complete redesign of the magnets lattice and an upgrade of the beamlines will be required. But in addition, the success of the ALBA II project will depend on multiple factors. First, after thirteen years in operation, all the subsystems of the current accelerator must be revised. To guarantee their lifetime until 2060, all the possible ageing and obsoles-cence factors must be considered. Besides, many tech-nical enhancements have improved performance and reliability in recent years. Using the latest technologies will also avoid obsolescence in the medium term, both in the hardware and the software. Considering this, the pro-ject ALBA II Computing Preliminary Study (ALBA II CPS) was launched in mid-2021, identifying 11 work packages. In each one, a group of experts were selected to analyze the different challenges and needs in the compu-ting and electronics fields for future accelerator design: from power supplies technologies, IOC architectures, or PLC-based automation systems to synchronization needs, controls software stack, IT Systems infrastructure or ma-chine learning opportunities. Now, we have a clearer picture of what is required. Hence, we can build a realistic project plan to ensure the success of the ALBA II. It is time to get ALBA II off the ground. PB - JACoW Publishing CP - Geneva, Switzerland SP - 691 EP - 694 KW - controls KW - operation KW - hardware KW - synchrotron KW - software DA - 2024/02 PY - 2024 SN - 2226-0358 SN - 978-3-95450-238-7 DO - doi:10.18429/JACoW-ICALEPCS2023-TUPDP077 UR - https://jacow.org/icalepcs2023/papers/tupdp077.pdf ER - TY - CONF AU - Götz, A. AU - AlMohammad, M. AU - Austin, P. AU - Bodin, M. AU - Bozhinov, V. AU - Cabezas Quirós, R. AU - Davies, L.E. AU - De Maria Antolinos, A. AU - Gaonach, M. AU - Gonzalez Beltran, A. AU - Krahl, R. AU - Matalgah, S.A. AU - Phipps, K.S. AU - Pinto, A. AU - Syder, K. ED - Schaa, Volker RW ED - Götz, Andy ED - Venter, Johan ED - White, Karen ED - Robichon, Marie ED - Rowland, Vivienne TI - Extending the ICAT Metadata Catalogue to New Scientific Use Cases J2 - Proc. of ICALEPCS2023, Cape Town, South Africa, 09-13 October 2023 CY - Cape Town, South Africa T2 - International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems T3 - 19 LA - english AB - The ICAT metadata catalogue is a flexible solution for managing scientific metadata and data from a wide variety of domains following the FAIR data principles. This paper will present an update of recent developments of the ICAT metadata catalogue and the latest status of the ICAT collaboration. ICAT was originally developed by UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) to manage the scientific data of ISIS Neutron and Muon Source and Diamond Light Source. They have since been joined by a number of other institutes including ESRF, HZB, SESAME, and ALBA who together now form the ICAT Collaboration. ICAT has been used to manage petabytes of scientific data for ISIS, DLS, ESRF, HZB, and in the future SESAME and ALBA and make these data FAIR. The latest version of the ICAT core as well as the new user interfaces, DataGateway and DataHub, and extensions to ICAT for implementing free text searching, a common search interface across Photon and Neutron catalogues, a protocol-based interface that allows making the metadata available for findability, electronic logbooks, sample tracking, and web-based data and domain specific viewers developed by the community will be presented. Finally recent developments to use ICAT to develop applications for processed data with rich metadata in the fields of small angle scattering, macromolecular crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy will be described. https://icatproject.org PB - JACoW Publishing CP - Geneva, Switzerland SP - 1033 EP - 1040 KW - experiment KW - SRF KW - site KW - synchrotron KW - interface DA - 2024/02 PY - 2024 SN - 2226-0358 SN - 978-3-95450-238-7 DO - doi:10.18429/JACoW-ICALEPCS2023-WE3BCO07 UR - https://jacow.org/icalepcs2023/papers/we3bco07.pdf ER - TY - CONF AU - Juerges, T. AU - Abeillé, G. AU - Auger-Williams, R.J. AU - Bertrand, B. AU - Bourtembourg, R. AU - Braun, T. AU - Cuní, G. AU - Götz, A. AU - Hardion, V. AU - Joubert, A.F. AU - Lacoste, D. AU - Leclercq, N. AU - Matveev, Yu. AU - Nabywaniec, M. AU - Noga, T.R. AU - Pascual-Izarra, C. AU - Pivetta, L. AU - Rubio-Manrique, S. AU - Żytniak, Ł. ED - Schaa, Volker RW ED - Götz, Andy ED - Venter, Johan ED - White, Karen ED - Robichon, Marie ED - Rowland, Vivienne TI - The Tango Controls Collaboration Status in 2023 J2 - Proc. of ICALEPCS2023, Cape Town, South Africa, 09-13 October 2023 CY - Cape Town, South Africa T2 - International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems T3 - 19 LA - english AB - Since 2021 the Tango Controls collaboration has improved and optimised its efforts in many areas. Not only have Special Interest Group meetings (SIGs) been introduced to speed up the adoption of new technologies or improvements, the kernel has switched to a fixed six-month release cycle for quicker adoption of stable kernel versions by the community. CI/CD provides now early feedback on test failures and compatibility issues. Major code refactoring allowed for a much more efficient use of developer resources. Relevant bug fixes, improvements and new features are now adopted at a much higher rate than ever before. The community participation has also noticeably improved. The kernel switched to C++14 and the logging system is undergoing a major refactoring. Among many new features and tools is jupyTango, Jupyter Notebooks on Tango Controls steroids. PyTango is now easy to install via binary wheels, old Python versions are no longer supported, the build-system is switching to CMake, and releases are now made much closer to stable cppTango releases. PB - JACoW Publishing CP - Geneva, Switzerland SP - 1100 EP - 1107 KW - TANGO KW - controls KW - Windows KW - device-server KW - software DA - 2024/02 PY - 2024 SN - 2226-0358 SN - 978-3-95450-238-7 DO - doi:10.18429/JACoW-ICALEPCS2023-TH1BCO03 UR - https://jacow.org/icalepcs2023/papers/th1bco03.pdf ER - TY - CONF AU - Lacoste, D. AU - Bourtembourg, R. AU - Forsberg, J. AU - Juerges, T. AU - Mol, J.J.D. AU - Pivetta, L. AU - Rubio-Manrique, S. AU - Scalamera, G. ED - Schaa, Volker RW ED - Götz, Andy ED - Venter, Johan ED - White, Karen ED - Robichon, Marie ED - Rowland, Vivienne TI - New Developements on HDB++, the High-performance Data Archiving for Tango Controls J2 - Proc. of ICALEPCS2023, Cape Town, South Africa, 09-13 October 2023 CY - Cape Town, South Africa T2 - International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems T3 - 19 LA - english AB - The Tango HDB++ project is a high performance event-driven archiving system which stores data with micro-second resolution timestamps. HDB++ supports many different backends, including MySQL/MariaDB, TimeScaleDB (a time-series PostgreSQL extension), and soon SQLite. Building on its flexible design, latest developments made supporting new backends even easier. HDB++ keeps improving with new features such as batch insertion and by becoming easier to install or setup in a testing environment, using ready to use docker images and striving to simplify all the steps of deployment. The HDB++ project is not only a data storage installation, but a full ecosystem to manage data, query it, and get the information needed. In this effort a lot of tools were developed to put a powerful backend to its proper use and be able to get the best out of the stored data. In this paper we will present as well the latest developments in data extraction, from low level libraries to web viewer integration such as grafana. Pointing out strategies in use in terms of data decimation, compression and others to help deliver data as fast as possible. PB - JACoW Publishing CP - Geneva, Switzerland SP - 1190 EP - 1194 KW - TANGO KW - database KW - controls KW - interface KW - extraction DA - 2024/02 PY - 2024 SN - 2226-0358 SN - 978-3-95450-238-7 DO - doi:10.18429/JACoW-ICALEPCS2023-THMBCMO01 UR - https://jacow.org/icalepcs2023/papers/thmbcmo01.pdf ER - TY - CONF AU - Avila-Abellan, J.A. AU - Cobb, T.M. AU - Hino, R. AU - Seeck, O.H. AU - Serra-Gallifa, X. AU - Zhang, S. ED - Schaa, Volker RW ED - Götz, Andy ED - Venter, Johan ED - White, Karen ED - Robichon, Marie ED - Rowland, Vivienne TI - Towards Defining a Synchronization Standard Between Beamline Components and Synchrotron Accelerators J2 - Proc. of ICALEPCS2023, Cape Town, South Africa, 09-13 October 2023 CY - Cape Town, South Africa T2 - International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems T3 - 19 LA - english AB - Standardization is a magic word in the electronics engineering jargon. Under its umbrella, it is generated the utopia of transparent integration with the rest of the parts with minimal extra effort for the software integration. But the experimental setup in a synchrotron beamline presents multiple challenges: it is highly dynamic and diverse. In the frame of LEAPS-INNOV project (*), the Task 3 of Work Package 5 aims to define a standard for synchronization in the beamline sample environment. Their partners (ALBA, DESY, DLS, ESRF and SOLEIL) have already reached a common vision of synchronization requirements. This paper first details the participants’ actual synchronization needs on their facilities. Next, the requirements foreseen for the future are outlined in terms of interfaces, time constraints and compatibility with timing systems. To conclude, we summarize the current state of the project: the hardware interfaces and the hardware platform definition. They both have been decided considering long-term availability, use of standard sub-components, and keeping the compromise between cost, development time, maintenance, reliability, flexibility and performance. This hardware architecture proposal meets the identified requirements. In the future, under the scope of LEAPS-INNOV, a demonstrator will be built, and we will work with the industry for its future commercialization. PB - JACoW Publishing CP - Geneva, Switzerland SP - 1242 EP - 1246 KW - experiment KW - interface KW - hardware KW - FPGA KW - synchrotron DA - 2024/02 PY - 2024 SN - 2226-0358 SN - 978-3-95450-238-7 DO - doi:10.18429/JACoW-ICALEPCS2023-THMBCMO22 UR - https://jacow.org/icalepcs2023/papers/thmbcmo22.pdf ER - TY - CONF AU - Reszela, Z. AU - Aguilar Larruy, J. AU - Bertrand, B. AU - Caixal i Joaniquet, M. AU - Cuní, G. AU - Forsberg, J. AU - Homs-Puron, R. AU - Morales, E. AU - Navarro, M. AU - Núñez Pardo de Vera, M.T. AU - Pascual-Izarra, C. AU - Piekarski, M. AU - Ramos, J.A. AU - Rubio-Manrique, S. AU - Schick, D. AU - Vallcorba, O. ED - Schaa, Volker RW ED - Götz, Andy ED - Venter, Johan ED - White, Karen ED - Robichon, Marie ED - Rowland, Vivienne TI - Improving User Experience and Performance in Sardana and Taurus: A Status Report and Roadmap J2 - Proc. of ICALEPCS2023, Cape Town, South Africa, 09-13 October 2023 CY - Cape Town, South Africa T2 - International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems T3 - 19 LA - english AB - Sardana Suite is an open-source scientific SCADA solution used in synchrotron light beamlines at ALBA, DESY, MAXIV and SOLARIS and in laser labs at MBI-Berlin. It is formed by Sardana and Taurus - both mature projects, driven by a community of users and developers for more than 10 years. Sardana provides a low level interface to the hardware, middle level abstractions and a sequence engine. Taurus is a library for developing graphical user interfaces. Sardana Suite uses client - server architecture and is built on top of TANGO. As a community, during the last few years, on one hand we were focusing on improving user experience, especially in terms of reliability and performance and on the other hand renewing the dependency stack. The system is now more stable, easier to debug and recover from a failure. An important effort was put in profiling and improving performance of Taurus applications startup. The codebase has been migrated to Python 3 and the plotting widgets were rewritten with pyqtgraph. This didn’t prevent us from delivering new features, like for example the long-awaited configuration tools and format based on YAML which is easy and intuitive to edit, browse, and track historical changes. Now we conclude this phase in the project’s lifetimes and are preparing for new challenging requirements in the area of continuous scans like higher data throughput and more complex synchronization configurations. Here we present the status report and the future roadmap. PB - JACoW Publishing CP - Geneva, Switzerland SP - 1420 EP - 1425 KW - TANGO KW - controls KW - interface KW - software KW - SCADA DA - 2024/02 PY - 2024 SN - 2226-0358 SN - 978-3-95450-238-7 DO - doi:10.18429/JACoW-ICALEPCS2023-THPDP050 UR - https://jacow.org/icalepcs2023/papers/thpdp050.pdf ER -