Run-time environment and application tools for the ground test accelerator control system

The control system for the ground test accelerator (GTA) at Los Alamos provides capabilities and tools that considerably reduce the amount of programming required to perform many applications. These qualities have proved to be valuable on early GTA experiments, where rapid prototyping has paid off. For instance, the initial controls for a 1 MW rf power supply provided supervisory control with no application-dependent programming. These same qualities will enable us to automate the start-up, operation and shutdown of the GTA. The run-time environment makes effective use of the distributed, nonhierarchical control-system architecture by providing a standard interface to the distributed data base. This paper gives an overview of the run-time software environment and the tools that simplify building the run-time data base, the operator interface screens, and application-specific control operations - sequential and continuous. (orig.)