Minutes of MW meeting Wednesday 12 September 2001

Present:  Francesco, Francois, Kris (minutes), Marc, Nikolai, Steen, Vito

Agenda

1. Summary of the holiday period

Kris made a summary of the CMW situation:

For the time being CMW is only marginally used in operation BUT there
are positive developments like (no particular order):

• We made working prototypes to access all existing equipment (PS, SL-Equip and OPC)
• SonicMQ has been installed and it is used.
• We have a close collaboration for the LHC power converters.
• Improvements were made in the RDA such that the update rate has been increased up to 100 times (important for PS and LHC PC)
• New server framework (cleaner and simpler) has been developed, which will allow full deployment in PS.
• Passerelle has been demonstrated with the full SL-Equip capabilities.
• Cesar is using SonicMQ for timing distribution.
• Database access servers (in Java) are operational (as far as sljas1 is operational)
• A first prototype for String2 alarm state reporting is using CMW OPC gateway. Full access to String2 alarms is in preparation.
• A new student, Roland Swoboda has arrived and started the work on equipment explorer and CMW console.

The most important now is:

• Increase the credibility by finishing the work on PS server and Passerelle and putting in use SL-Equip gateway for BI.
• Provide a good support for the LHC Power Converters and other project (String2 OPC GW, Passerelle, BI)
• Finish the SUM and organize generation and deployment cycle of software.

2. Support for clients

Kris explained what is needed in terms of client support.

Support in PS is simpler as there are only two clients: The Application section and the Front-End Software section. The first is mainly interested in the client API and the second in the Device Adapter and the communication software (RDA).

In the SL the "big" client would be SPS2001 but for the time being it is using a different communication software. Due to the structure of the division we have several small clients, in equipment groups or as projects:

• The Passerelle project which is putting Excel/VB client on top of CMW.
• LHC Power Converters are testing CMW capabilities and making a prototype Device Adapter.
• The Alarms section is making a prototype for the extraction of String2 alarms via an OPC Adapter.
• Device Explorer as an internal CMW client.

These clients need a support in terms of better SUM, working client/server examples downloadable in source code and with a Makefile and libraries installed in the default places for both divisions. We must put some effort into this.

It has been proposed that libraries have to be downloadable from  the Web.

It has also been proposed that the SUM will be put in Razor so that project members can update it.

Marc and Francois will make a prototype of CMW installation in SL.

3. Development

Client API - Vito has added inserting/extracting of objects to/from Data object. He also made SL-Equip extensions available as Razor thread.

RDA - Nikolai has done a lot of work on RDA during the summer. The main changes are:

• Fast update protocol. This has improved the publish rate, which was ~2000/sec in RDA0.9 by factor 10-100. This was achieved by using variants rather than CORBA any and by buffering updates per listener and flushing them when the acquisition process terminated.
• "cern" prefix in the package structure.
• support for Java long (64 bits)

The new protocol is compatible with the previous releases (0.9).

CMW server framework - Steen has finished the new framework. Kris asked that it will be put into Razor and the Doxygen generated documentation delivered.

Java Framework - Bartek has put it in Razor and is waiting for feedback from Vito and Francesco.

MOM API - Francesco has made static analysis of code with analyser tools, introduced a multithreaded consumer (allows multisessions from a single client). He is using Log4J for logging. The mom version is 0.9.1 and the doc is to be updated. The C/C++ API of SonicMQ is being tested.

DB utilities - Servers for SL-Equip DB, PS DB and OPC DB have been installed on sljas1. They are used for SL-Equip adapter and for the Device Explorer.

SL-Equip Adapter - It is finished and is running permanently as a gateway on pclsux8. It is being used for Passerelle and it will be used for the Device Explorer. It has also been tested on Lynx3.1 with test equipment servers.

Vito has asked for a milestone plan for the various activities.