GMV was present at the EPICS Collaboration Meeting hosted by ITER in France from 3 to 7 June.

EPICS (Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System) is one of the most widely used software architectures in physics and industrial-control-system experiments. It is a set of open-source software tools, libraries and applications developed collaboratively and used worldwide to create distributed soft real-time control systems for scientific instruments such as particle accelerators, telescopes, experiment beam lines and other large scientific experiments.

EPICS collaboration meetings, held since the nineties of last century in various venues around the world, aim to provide a chance for developers and managers from the various sites to come together and discuss their work and progress, and make plans for the future. They likewise provide a chance to see what is being done at other companies, centers and laboratories, and to review the specifications for new tools or enhancements to existing ones in order to maximize their usefulness to the whole community and avoid duplication of effort.

GMV has by now built up a wealth of experience and expertise in critical real-time software engineering on the strength of client services and projects, and in particular in the design and development of instrumentation and control solutions based on EPICS.

Javier Moreno, GMV’s head of projects in the Large Science Facilities area, attended this meeting to give two papers about GMV’s activity in this field.

In the first paper he talked about progress being made in the project “NDS Core Software Support for CODAC Core System”. In this project GMV is developing for ITER new functions in the open-source tool “Nominal Device Support V3” (NDS3), with the aim of streamlining and standardizing the development of synchronization and data-acquisition drivers for integration in EPICS. This project, involving the collaboration of the Research Group on Instrumentation and Applied Acoustics (I2A2) of the Polytechnic University of Madrid (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid), is also providing support for NDS3 users in ITER.

The second paper dealt with the work underway to integrate EPICS into an embedded Android-based system for control of a high-stability power converter EPOWERSYS (developed by Elytt Energy) to power magnets in particle accelerators; the European Spallation Source (ESS) is one of the current clients.