Control systems for accelerators: Operational tools

Abstract

Today engineers designing, building, modifying or migrating control systems for accelerators or large physics experiments have free access to very mature, adaptable, reliable, and high-performance control system toolkits, which have been developed by professional, global collaborations. Interconnectivity between the different control systems is well developed, even industrial vendors provide their devices “control system ready”. With respect to software and networking, an abundance of solutions and applications is already available. But the collaborative power of sharing, effort and success fades as it comes to non-standardized hardware. FPGA-based boards and recent attempts, like the “open hardware initiative”, might move this frontier and open up uncharted waters.