SBIR-STTR Award

The data archiver and data acquisition system (DAQ) are two of the essential tools in the commissioning and operation of the accelerator facilities and large scientific experiments. The scale, data rate, and complexity of the new light source facilities trigger two principal topics: demand for a new type of database technology and consolidation of the control and experimental data management systems. This project addresses the problem by proposing an integrated approach based on the new SciDB array-oriented database management system and an adapter framework for storing and processing the EPICS control historical data and HDF5 files generated from the beamline experiments. Phase I will demonstrate the feasibility and advantage of this approach by prototyping the EPICS and HDF5 drivers. Phase II will advance these prototypes and build the production release including the integration with the new EPICS v4 infrastructure. The introduction of EPICS as a control system toolkit has already saved the DOE millions of dollars in development time by removing the need for each accelerator project to start from scratch as was the case prior to the development of EPICS. The proposed project aims to extend these benefits to the integrated accelerator and beamline environment.

The Phase 1 grant that serves as a precursor to this proposal, prototyped complex storage techniques for high speed structured data that is being produced in accelerator diagnostics and beam line experiments. It demonstrates the technologies that can be used to archive and retrieve complex data structures and provide the performance required by our new accelerators, instrumentations, and detectors. Phase 2 is proposed to develop a high performance platform for data acquisition and analysis to provide physicists and operators a better understanding of the beam dynamics. This proposal includes developing a high performance platform for reading 109 MHz data at 10 KHz rates through a multicore front end processor, archiving the data to an archive repository that is then indexed for fast retrieval. The data is then retrieved from this data archive, integrated with the scalar data, to provide data sets to client applications for analysis, use in feedback, and to aid in identifying problem with the instrumentation, plant, beam steering, or model. This development is built on EPICS version 4, which is being successfully deployed to implement physics applications. Through prior SBIR grants, EPICS version 4 has a solid communication protocol for middle layer services (PVAccess), structured data representation and methods for efficient transportation and access (PVData), an operational hierarchical record environment (JAVA IOC), and prototypes for standard structured data (Normative Types). This work was further developed through project funding to successfully deploy the first service based physics application environment with demonstrated services that provide arbitrary object views, save sets, model, lattice, and unit conversion. Thin client physics applications have been developed in Python that implement quad centering, orbit display, bump control, and slow orbit feedback. This service based architecture has provided a very modular and robust environment that enables commissioning teams to rapidly develop and deploy small scripts that build on powerful services. These services are all built on relational database data stores and scalar data. The work proposed herein, builds on these previous successes to provide data acquisition of high speed data for online analysis clients.