EPICS-based visualisation and control in DAQ systems

Data acquisition plays a great role in control and monitoring systems. There is a wide choice of both the hardware and software solutions for implementing a data acquisition system. The authors of this paper designed and implemented a use case of an ATCA-based data acquisition system for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) facility. Among the requirements of the systems were throughputs in the order of up to 10 Gbps, high reliability and the possibility to monitor and control data acquisition parameters. The latter requirements were met using the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) which is employed by the Control Data Access and Communication (CODAC) system in ITER. It allows to build server applications that interact with the hardware and provide an interface to EPICS clients. One of such clients is Best OPI Yet (BOY), which is part of the Control System Studio (CSS) package. It provides an editor and a runtime for developing operator panel interfaces. This paper shortly introduces the architecture of the designed DAQ system but focuses mostly on the implementation of the EPICS Input-Output Controller (IOC) as well as the operator panels designed in BOY.