Controls GUI Strategies @ICALEPCS 2023
Room 8/9
Cape Town (South Africa)
- The latest status and plans of GUI solutions used in Control systems across the world
- Charting solutions & data decimation
- Synoptics
- Web application packaging and deployment
- Zero/Low-code solutions
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Introduction & workshop overviewSpeaker: Chris Roderick (CERN)
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GUI Technologies & Evolution Plans Overview
Round-up of GUI technologies in use in various institutes, together with latest evolution plans (lightning talks, followed by group-discussion).
Convener: Chris Roderick (CERN)-
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GUI Situation & Strategy @ CERN
CERN Accelerator Controls strategy for GUI is based on two technology stacks and two development approaches. In this session, we will explain the scope of the different solutions and give their development statuses.
Our plans to remove older technologies will also be discussed.Speaker: Stephane Deghaye (CERN) -
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GUI Situation & Strategy @ MAX IVSpeaker: Vincent Hardion
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09:50
Tea / Coffee - offline discussions
An opportunity to discuss further over a drink
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GUI Situation & Strategy @ Other Institutes
A summary overview of the GUI situation & strategy at other participating institutes. It is foreseen to have an open discussion around the various approaches, ideas, challenges, etc.
Speaker: Chris Roderick (CERN)
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12:10
Lunch
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Zero/Low-code Solutions
Zero/low-code solutions (lightning talks / demos, followed by group-discussion)
In a challenge faced by many institutes is how to enable equipment experts, physicists and operators to produce graphical applications that meet their needs, without having to invest a significant effort into writing fully-fledged graphical applications and worry about maintaining these over time as the underlying technologies inevitably evolve.
In this session, we will look at examples of developments from different institutes the aim to address this point, hearing about what has been achieved so far, and the associated challenges such as technical complexity and user acceptance.
Convener: Chris Roderick (CERN)-
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Taurus
An introduction of the Taurus library [1] (PyQt based) and demos of:
- The TaurusGUI framework (creation of GUIs without programming but with: a wizard, drag and drop and floating panels)
- Creating Taurus widgets/applications with the Qt designer.
- A brief demo of the Taurus evaluation scheme for making quick operations on the model data later on visualized by the widgets.[1] https://accelconf.web.cern.ch/ICALEPCS2015/papers/thhc3o03.pdf#search=%20domain%3Daccelconf%2Eweb%2Ecern%2Ech%20%20%2Btitle%3A%22Taurus%22%20%20url%3Aaccelconf%2FICALEPCS2015%20FileExtension%3Dpdf%20%2Durl%3Aabstract%20%2Durl%3Aaccelconf%2Fjacow
Speaker: Mr Zbigniew Reszela (ALBA Synchrotron) -
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Taranta Status Update & DemoSpeaker: Matteo Canzari
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10
CERN Accelerator Controls WRAP GUI Platform
WRAP (Web-based Rapid Application Platform) is a zero-code platform that allows anybody to easily configure GUI applications to interact with CERN's accelerator control system. In this session, we will briefly explain the motivation for WRAP, the technologies used, the current status and key challenges, as well as a demo.
Speaker: Stephane Deghaye (CERN) -
14:40
Tea / Coffee - offline discussions
An opportunity to discuss further over a drink
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11
Radiasoft low-code GUIs
For the past ten years RadiaSoft has been developing browser based GUIs for accelerator simulations. Recently we have begun integrating these simulation tools with control displays that are automatically generated using lattice files for accelerators and beamlines. Our software automatically configures the display and provides users with visualizations that replicate those seen in the control room. This can be connected to the control system for processing of live data and for comparison with simulations or other online models. We will provide a demonstration of our software tools and show how they can be applied to different machines.
Speakers: Evan Carlin (RadiaSoft), Jonathan Edelen (RadiaSoft)
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8
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Charting Solutions & Data Decimation
Charting solutions & data decimation (lightning talks / demos, followed by group-discussion).
Charting usually plays an important role in graphical applications and it is common to face challenges related to charting performance, especially for large volumes of data. In this session, we will look at a few charting solutions used in different institutes, from 3rd party libraries to custom developments. We will also explore examples of data decimation used to alleviate the performance needs placed upon the actual charts.
Convener: Chris Roderick (CERN)- 12
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Open discussion around Charting & Data Decimation
Discussion amongst the participants on how charting and data decimation is being implemented in different institutes, what is working well, what challenges people are facing, and what ideas people have in mind.
Everyone is encouraged to speak up and even showcase things from their institute according to the on-going discussion.
Speaker: Chris Roderick (CERN)
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Controls Synoptics
Synoptics: examples related to Controls (lightning talks / demos, followed by group-discussion).
In this session we will look at different examples of how synoptics are being technically implemented, maintained and integrate with Control systems.
Convener: Chris Roderick (CERN)-
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SVG SynopticsSpeaker: Vincent Hardion
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Synoptic generation based on accelerator data & SSVGs
CERN has extensive data describing the accelerators and their beam-lines and several user communities expressed the wish to be able to leverage the data to produce dynamic synoptic views. While we are still in a prototyping stage, we would like to share with the community our requirements and initial implementation choices in order to gather experience-based feedback.
In addition, we will show the Stateful Scalable Vector Graphics (SSVG) application and how it has been integrated into CERN's WRAP platform.Speaker: Stephane Deghaye (CERN)
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14
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Web Application Packaging & Deployment
Web application packaging and deployment (lightning talks / demos, followed by group-discussion).
One of the challenges of implementing Controls applications to the acceptance of experienced end-users is to package and deploy the Web applications in a manner that makes them appear like traditional desktop applications. During this contribution we will look at a few examples of how different teams are approaching this issue and their return on experience so far.
Convener: Chris Roderick (CERN)-
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Packaging the WRAP application for the CERN Control Centre
The deployment of web applications directly in browsers for the accelerators control rooms can lead to integration and UX issues. In this session, we would like to report on our experience with the two leading solutions for the web application packaging, Electron and Tauri. We will present the benchmark results and well as how the development pipelines were set up to include package creation and deployment.
Speaker: Anti Asko (CERN)
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Workshop CloseoutSpeaker: Chris Roderick (CERN)
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