ICALEPCS 2025 - The 20th International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems

Operational experience and optimization techniques for large EPICS control system environments

TUBR004

23 Sept 2025, 11:15

15m

Red Lacquer Room (Palmer House Hilton Chicago)

Contributed Oral Presentation MC03: Control System Sustainment and Management TUBR MC03 Control System Sustainment and Management

Speaker

Klemen Vodopivec (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

Description

The Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) utilizes the EPICS control system to manage the main accelerator, multiple test stands, and most neutron scattering instruments. The control system environment for the main accelerator alone includes approximately 300 Input/Output Controllers (IOCs), 200 soft IOCs, and 100 Operator Interface (OPI) workstations, all communicating through over 1,000,000 process variables. The EPICS distributed control system relies heavily on UDP broadcast communication to locate process variables on the network, which can significantly impact the operation of connected devices and, in turn, affect accelerator uptime. In this paper, we present operational challenges and discuss optimization techniques applied to the EPICS environment at SNS.

Funding Agency

This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences under contract number DE-AC05-00OR22725