An Approach To Portable Machine Physics Applications

M. Plesko, Institute Jozef Stefan, Ljubljana, Slovenia
C.J. Bocchetta, F. Iazzourene, E. Karantzoulis, R. Nagaoka and L. Tosi, Sincrotrone Trieste, Italy

Usually, shareable high level software (HLS) packages which perform machine physics calculations have to be run off-line on a specially prepared set of data. The programs that perform the necessary measurements contain explicit references to the underlying control system and are built with specific equipment in mind. Both reasons make it difficult to adopt existing HLS to another accelerator without substantial modifications.

An approach to overcome these limitations has been attempted at ELETTRA, a 2 GeV electron storage ring. The HLS applications use A) a data structure which uniquely describes the accelerator and is dynamically generated at run-time from a dedicated database and B) a set of utility routines which transparently access the control system and perform machine physics related calculations.

Both the data structure and the routines are based on common accelerator physics concepts and are not specific to ELETTRA. The user interface of the applications, which form a complete set of on-line commissioning and operation tools, is consistently realized with the X11/Motif toolkit, the code is written in the language C. Therefore, most of the applications, which comprise an effort of 10+ person-years, can easily be transferred to other accelerators as long as their control system uses UNIX workstations.

The applications, the data structure, the utility routines and a generalization of the concepts in order to obtain a completely portable set of HLS applications are presented in this paper.