SYSTEM DESIGN AND PERFORMANCE FOR THE RECENT DIII-D NEUTRAL BEAM COMPUTER UPGRADE Page: 4 of 6
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System Design and Performance for the Recent DIII-D Neutral Beam
Computer Upgrade
J.C. Phillips, B.G. Penaflor, N.Q. Pham, and D.A. Piglowski
General Atomics, P.O. Box 85608, San Diego, California 92186-5608Abstract. This operating year marks an upgrade to the
computer system charged with control and data acquisition for
neutral beam injection system's heating at the DIII-D National
Fusion Facility, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and
operated by General Atomics (GA), This upgrade represents the
third and latest major revision to a system which has been in
service over twenty years. The first control and data acquisition
computers were four 16 bit "mini" computers running a
proprietary operating system. Each of the four controlled two ion
source over dedicated CAMAC highway. In a 1995 upgrade, the
system evolved to be two 32 bit Motorola mini-computers
running a version of UNIX. Each computer controlled four ion
sources with two CAMAC highways per CPU. This latest
upgrade builds on this same logical organization, but makes
significant advances in cost, maintainability, and the degree to
which the system is open to future modification. The new control
and data acquisition system is formed of two 2 GHz Intel
Pentium 4 based PC's, running the LINUX operating system.
Each PC drives two CAMAC serial highways using a
combination of Kinetic Systems PCI standard CAMAC
Hardware Drivers and a low-level software driver written in-
house expressly for this device. This paper discusses the overall
system design and implementation detail, describing actual
operating experience for the initial six months of operation.
I. INTRODUCTION
This latest upgrade of the neutral beam (NB) computers
was crafted on time and on budget, using an optimized
combination of in-house written applications and commercial
packages. The systems are generic PC's, using the Intel
Pentium 4 processor, clocked at 2.0 GHz. The OS is LINUX
(Red Hat 7.2). Hardware is absolutely standard, with the
exception of two specialized PCI bus cards, manufactured by
Kinetic Systems, used to drive two serial data highways
conforming to the CAMAC Standard. There are two identical
NB computers, managing a total of four CAMAC Highways,
eight neutral beam sources organized into four neutral
beamlines.
Generating the graphical user interface (GUI) or screens
for the new system was done using a commercial package,
Kylix by Borland [1]. These screens are intimately bound to
the run-time database for cyclical update of values displayed,
and in an on-demand mode for asserting new set-points or the
invocation of various processes or tasks. Fig. I shows operator
top-level control for one of eight neutral beam systems. Each
screen is compiled from source code.
II. HARDWARE
Connectivity for neutral beam computer system hardware
is now the simplest it has ever been. As shown in Fig. 2,
besides the essentials - power, keyboard, mouse, and monitorFig. 1. An example of a
operator's console.the beam
Beam1
1010 bTW herneBeam
3 010 3T E1ereFig. 2. Neutral beam computer system hardware -
connectivity.
- each CPU has one 100bT Ethernet connection, and two
fiber optic pairs, one for each of two CAMAC Highways.
The primary interface for each NB computer (Fig. 3), is a
"3 Headed" X Terminal - The X Terminal is comprised of
three 21" screens which form a continuous virtual desktop. In
other words, the mouse may be moved continuously from the
left edge of the leftmost monitor through the center screen, to
the right edge of the rightmost monitor, as one virtual screen.
III. SYSTEM DESIGN
The basic design of the neutral beam computer systems is
in common with the DIII-D tokamak operations computer, but
with certain extended functionality. The NB computers each
controls two CAMAC Highways, rather than one. The NB
computer systems, in addition to controlling power supplies
and shot sequencing, do data acquisition, (some 40 waveformsGENERAL AToMICS REPORT GA-A24514 1
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PHILLIPS,J.C; PENAFLOR,B.G; PHAM,N.Q & PIGLOWSKI,D.A. SYSTEM DESIGN AND PERFORMANCE FOR THE RECENT DIII-D NEUTRAL BEAM COMPUTER UPGRADE, article, October 1, 2003; United States. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc788468/m1/4/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.