On the Use of CORBA in High Level Software Applications at the SLS

TL;DR

This paper discusses how CORBA middleware facilitates distributed control and data management in beam dynamics applications at the Swiss Light Source, enabling integration of various software components.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive implementation of CORBA-based distributed computing for high-level control in a synchrotron light source environment.

Findings

Successful integration of multiple software components via CORBA

Enhanced remote access to control and physics data

Reliable server reactivation and data propagation mechanisms

Abstract

Beam dynamics applications at the Swiss Light Source (SLS) have benefitted from a distributed computing environment in which the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) forms the middleware layer and access point to several different software components.A suite of remote CORBA server objects provides the client with a convenient and uniform interface to the CDEV (Common DEVice) controls library, the TRACY accelerator physics package, the Oracle database, and en event logging facility. Use is made of methods provided by the CORBA Portable Object Adaptor for accessing ORB functions, such as object activation and object persistence, the Implementation Repository for the automatic reactivation of servers, and the CORBA Event Service for the propagation of controls and physics data. An account of the CORBA framework, as used by applications in the commissioning and first operation of the SLS, is presented.