Control system of the MACSE project

With the goal of investigating all the technological aspects of superconducting RF acceleration, the so-called MACSE facility was put in operation at the end of 1990. The control system is built with several VME crates linked together with a dedicated Ethernet network. VxWorks is the real-time operating system used. A set of software services was built on top of VxWorks (high level communication tools, a data-base management system, a library of VME boards drivers and a limited man-machine interface). A complete range of application programs have been developed with these tools in order to fulfill the requirements of such a facility (settings of the parameters, surveillance, archive facility, closed loops...). The TCP-IP protocols family is extensively used for communications between the components of the system (UDP, RPC, rcmd, NFS). The development environment is based on the host-target approach through the use of a network of Sun 3/80 workstations. After 1 1/2 year of experience, this system has proven to be powerful and flexible