Slow control system for the STAR experiment

The STAR (solenoidal tracker At RHIC) experiment located at Brookhaven National Laboratory has been studying relativistic heavy ion collisions since it began operation in the summer of 2000. An EPICS-based hardware controls system monitors the detector´s 40,000 operating parameters. The system uses VME processors and PC´s to communicate with sub-system based sensors over a variety of field busses. The system also includes interfaces to accelerator and magnet control systems, an archiver with CGI web-based interface and C++-based communication between STAR online system, run control and hardware controls and their associated databases. An upgrade project underway. This involves the migration of 60% of the I/O control from the aging VME processors to PC´s. The host system has been transferred from Sun OS to Scientific Linux and some VME boards were replaced with soft IOC applications. The experience gained with the current setup will be discussed, upgrade plans and progress will be outlined.