The design of the Alba control system: a cost-effective distributed hardware and software architecture

Alba is a third generation synchrotron located in Spain. The control system of Alba is highly distributed. The hardware infrastructure for the control system includes in the order of 350 racks, 17000 cables and 6300 equipment. More than 150 disk-less industrial computers, distributed in the service area and 30 multi-core servers in the data center, manage several thousands of process variables. In this environment, the software client server model, with fast and reliable communications, was imposed. Tango plays an important role. It is a big success story of the Tango Collaboration, where a complete middle-ware schema is available 'off the shelf'. Moreover, Tango has been effectively complemented with Sardana SCADAs (Supervision Control And Data Acquisition), a great development effort shared and used in several other institutes. The whole installation has been coordinated from the beginning with a complete cabling and equipment database, where all the equipment, cables, connectors are described and inventoried. The cabling database, or ccdb can be considered as the core of the installation since it soon turned out into a central repository for the whole installation. This paper explains the design and the architecture of the control system, describes the tools and justifies the choices made. Finally, it presents and analyzes the figures regarding cost and performances. (authors)