December 2013

Conference Paper

THE NEW SOFT-IOC-BASED ALARM HANDLER AT THE SPALLATION NEUTRON SOURCE

By:
Gurd, Pamela ; Lawson, Gregory S; Munro Jr, John K; Strong, William H; Williams Jr, Ernest
Page Number:
655
Volume:
N/A
Publication Date:
December 2013
Conference Name:
International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems
Conference Location:
Knoxville, Tennessee, United States of America
Conference Sponsor:
ORNL; SNS; TJNAF

Abstract

The standard EPICS alarm handler tool (ALH) does not integrate well with other EPICS client applications. At SNS, we wanted the ability to incorporate alarm summaries and alarm controls such as masks and resets into screens in the display manager as well as the ability to call display screens from alarm screens. To achieve these aims, we built a soft-IOC-based alarm handler that runs in Linux soft IOCs. A set of scripts builds EPICS databases, display manager screens, and startup scripts for standard Linux soft IOCs from old EPICS Alarm Handler (ALH) or extensible markup language (XML) configuration files. With this new tool the summaries, masks and latch status can be incorporated into other EPICS client applications. In this paper we describe our experience building and using the soft-IOC-based alarm handler everywhere that alarms are defined in the SNS control system.

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