Experiences with advanced CORBA services

TL;DR

This paper shares practical experiences and performance benchmarks of using various advanced CORBA services in control systems like ANKA and ALMA, highlighting benefits and challenges encountered.

Contribution

It provides real-world insights into deploying multiple CORBA services across large-scale control systems, including performance analysis and vendor comparisons.

Findings

CORBA services are effective for control system data transfer and device modeling.

Performance benchmarks show scalability limits and reliability of CORBA services.

Vendor implementations vary, impacting system integration and performance.

Abstract

The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is successfully used in many control systems (CS) for data transfer and device modeling. Communication rates below 1 millisecond, high reliability, scalability, language independence and other features make it very attractive. For common types of applications like error logging, alarm messaging or slow monitoring, one can benefit from standard CORBA services that are implemented by third parties and save tremendous amount of developing time. We have started using few CORBA services on our previous CORBA-based control system for the light source ANKA [1] and use now several CORBA services for the ALMA Common Software (ACS) [2], the core of the control system of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array. Our experiences with the interface repository (IFR), the implementation repository, the naming service, the property service, telecom log service and the notify service from different vendors are presented. Performance and scalability benchmarks have been performed.