ESRF successfully stored beam in the new EBS storage ring

For more than two years, the Accelerator Control unit has been designing preparing the control system for all the pieces of equipment and prepared a simulated control-system above the Accelerator Toolkit physics model of the new machine.

We developped the software  for the remote control of each new hardware which are necessary to control this new accelerator. All the hardware had been specified and/or chosen together with each equipment responsible following some common requirement for the remote control. This development was started first on the specification of the interface given by the supplier, then debugged and commissionned on few prototypes procured in advance. 

In the same time, the overall computer hardware infrastructure have been upgraded. A new virtualization system have been installed and the virtual machines installed everywhere it was convenient. All the physical machines have been upgraded to the last version of operating system.

Last but not least, the simulated accelerator control system allowed to work well before having the detailed description of each hardware interface. All the upper layer software andt the graphical users interfaces could efficiently be designed and tested on this simulator. The physicist could develop all the tools for correcting the future orbit, tuning the future optic and applying strengths on all the magnets well before the real installation of the hardware in the tunnel.

After only 10 months of shutdown for dismantling the old Storage-ring, adapting the injection system and installing the tens of tousands of pieces of equipments, the beam have been injected in the new storage ring at the foreseen date and within the foreseen budget.

The Accelerator control system based on TANGO was ready at the d date with all the high level user interfaces for allowing the physicists to tune this brand new machine using all the high level users interfaced initially prepared on the simulator. TANGO was one of the key of the success  thank's to it's modularity, flexibility and efficient design. 

The system includes several hundreds of hosts and more than 22000 devices ( see below)