Equipment Manager of the VME Control System for the SPring-8 Storage Ring

A. Taketani, S. Fujiwara, T. Fukui, T. Masuda,
R. Tanaka, T. Wada, W. Xu, and A. Yamashita

SPring-8, Kamigori, Ako-gun, Hyogo 678-12, Japan

We developed a generic "Equipment Manager(EM)" server process on the VME system in order to control equipments of the SPring-8 storage ring. The EM is designed based on the device abstraction concept, that is, we can control accelerator components directly without knowing the low-level physical device configuration. This concept provides a quite flexible architecture of application software away from complex device dependent part. The message, used for communications between application programs running on the console and the EM on the VME system, is distributed by using ONC/RPC communication scheme with the TCP/IP protocol over the fiber network. The format of a command can be described in an English-like syntax S/V/O/C as a character string, where S is a sender's identification, V is an action, O is a target equipment, and C is a value to be written or the status to be read. Human-oriented message syntax is close to the object-oriented concept, which is quite easy to understand and parse by accelerator operators. The EM controls VME based equipments according to the device configuration table, which links control of logical equipments to physical VME devices. Access to the accelerator component except through the EM is forbidden.