The Fermilab accelerator control system

With the advent of the Tevatron, considerable upgrades have been made to the controls of all the Fermilab Accelerators. The current system is based on making as large an amount of data as possible available to many operators or end-users. Specifically there are about 100000 separate readings, settings, and status and control registers in the various machines, all of which can be accessed by seventeen consoles, some in the Main Control Room and others distributed throughout the complex. A ''Host'' computer network of approximately eighteen PDP-11/34's, seven PDP-11/44's, and three VAX-11/785's supports a distributed data acquisition system including Lockheed MAC-16's left from the original Main Ring and Booster instrumentation and upwards of 1000 Z80, Z8002, and M68000 microprocessors in dozens of configurations. Interaction of the various parts of the system is via a central data base stored on the disk of one of the VAXes. The primary computer-hardware communication is via CAMAC for the new Tevatron and Antiproton Source; certain subsystems, among them vacuum, refrigeration and quench protection, reside in the distributed microprocessors and communicate via GAS, an in-house protocol. An important hardware feature is an accurate clock system making a large number of encoded ''events'' in the accelerator supercycle available for both hardware modules and computers. System software features include the ability to save the current state of the machine or any subsystem and later restore it or compare it with the state at another time, a general logging facility to keep track of specific variables over long periods of time, detection of 'exception conditions' and the posting of alarms, and a central filesharing capability in which files on VAX disks are available for access by any of the ''Host'' processors. (orig.)