First Installation of DANTE, A Macinthosh Based Control System
Using the Labview Environment

G. Baldini, G. Di Pirro, M. Masciarelli, C. Milardi,
A. Stecchi, L. Trasatti, M. Verola
INFN-Frascati


DANTE is the control system for the DAFNE PHI Factory of the Frascati Laboratories of INFN. Ten of the 80 CPUs foreseen for the system have been installed for the commissioning of the first section of the accelerator system. DANTE has several innovative aspects:
- Macintosh Quadra 650 Personal Computers are used as consoles, and the VME CPUs have been built using Macintosh LCIII processor boards. The system takes thus advantage of the facilities of Apple System 7 and of third party commercial software (Program to Program communication, diskless bootstrap, remote debugging, etc.)
- LabVIEWreg. has been used as development environment both for the consoles and for the peripheral CPUs. This system has proven robust and stable, and perfectly capable of controlling a large multiprocessor system.
- point to point high speed fiber optic links have been used instead of a network for high bandwidth system update;
- the open architecture allows accelerator physics applications for operation and modeling to be integrated in the control system. It is possible to run code written in C and FORTRAN from the LabVIEWreg. environment interactively, and conversely to access the control system and its database from external programs. Both systems use direct process to process communication. A first implementation is operating to test the architecture as well as the FORTRAN library for accelerator physics which we have developed to help standardize the applications.