Speaker
Frederic Bruno Magniette
(Ecole Polytechnique (FR))
Description
High-energy physics experiments produce huge amounts of data that need to be processed and stored for further analysis and eventually treated in real time for triggering and monitoring purposes. In addition, more and more often these requirements are also being found on other fields such as on-line video processing, proteomics and astronomical facilities.
The complexity of such experiments usually involves long development times on which simple test-bench prototypes evolve over time and require increasingly performant software solutions for both data acquisition and control systems. Flexibility and wide application range are, therefore, important conditions in order to keep a single software solution that can evolve over the duration of the development period.
Existing solutions such as LabView provide proprietary solutions for control applications and small scale data acquisition, but fail on scaling to high-throughput experiments, add an important performance penalty and become difficult to maintain when the complexity of the software flow increases. Other lower-level solutions such as LabWindows/C, Matlab or TANGO allow to build more complex systems but still fail on providing an integrated and close to turn-key solution for the specific needs of prototypes evolving from bench-based tests to distributed environments with high data-throughput needs.
The present work reports on the software Pyrame, an open-source framework designed with high-energy physics applications in mind and providing a light-weight, distributed, stable, performant and easy-to-deploy solution. Pyrame is a data-acquisition chain, a data-exchange network protocol and a wide set of drivers allowing the control of hardware components. Data-acquisition throughput is on the order of 1.7 Gb/s for UDP/IP and Pyrame’s protocol overhead is about 1.6 ms per command/response using the stock tools.
Pyrame provides basic blocks (modules) for hardware control or data acquisition. It contains an important number of modules to manage commonly used hardware: high and low voltage power supplies (Agilent, CAEN, Hameg, Keithley...), pattern generators (Agilent), digital oscilloscopes (LeCroy), motion controllers (Newport) and bus adapters (GPIB, USB, RS-232, Ethernet, UDP, TCP…). Generic modules give a unified access to machines from different generations and native or emulated functions depending on the possibilities of the machines.
Pyrame also provides service modules, including: a multimedia and multistream high-performance acquisition chain; a variable module allowing to share data between all the hardware modules; and a configuration management module allowing to save or load an image of the global configuration of the system at any time.
These blocks can be assembled together through Pyrame’s software bus and protocol to quickly obtain complete systems for test benches. The framework is very flexible and provides a wide range of options, allowing the system to evolve as fast as the prototype.
In order to ease the development of extensions, Pyrame uses open standards: TCP and XML. They are implemented on most platforms and in most languages making the development of new modules fast and easy. The use of TCP/IP eases the distribution of code on multi-computer setups, but also its use on embedded platforms.
Multiple test-beams at DESY have validated the stability of the system. In particular, our tests have involved data acquisition sessions of hundreds of hours from up to 10 simultaneous Si-based particle detectors distributed over multiple computers. Very long calibration procedures involving hundreds of thousands of configuration operations have also been performed. On another optical bench, simultaneous control and data acquisition of oscilloscopes, motorized stages and power supplies confirmed the same level of stability for long acquisition sessions.
Primary authors
Frederic Bruno Magniette
(Ecole Polytechnique (FR))
Dr
Miguel Rubio-Roy
(CNRS)
