The new control system of the Saclay linear accelerator

A new control system for the Saclay Linear Accelerator designed during the two past years is now in operation. The computer control architecture is based on 3 dedicated VME crates: one crate with a disk-based operating system runs the high level application programs and the database management facilities, another one manages the man-machine communications and the third one interfaces the system to the linac equipments. At the present time, communications between the VME micro-computers are done through 16 bit parallel links. The software is modular and organized in specific layers, the database is fully distributed. About 90% of the code is written in Fortran. The present status of the system is discussed and the hardware and software developments are described