EPICS-Large-Scale High-Performance Integrated Data Storage for Accelerator and Beamline Experiments

The data archiver and data acquisition system (DAQ) are two of the essential tools in the commissioning and operation of the accelerator facilities and large scientific experiments. The scale, data rate, and complexity of the new light source facilities trigger two principal topics: demand for a new type of database technology and consolidation of the control and experimental data management systems. This project addresses the problem by proposing an integrated approach based on the new SciDB array-oriented database management system and an adapter framework for storing and processing the EPICS control historical data and HDF5 files generated from the beamline experiments. Phase I will demonstrate the feasibility and advantage of this approach by prototyping the EPICS and HDF5 drivers. Phase II will advance these prototypes and build the production release including the integration with the new EPICS v4 infrastructure. The introduction of EPICS as a control system toolkit has already saved the DOE millions of dollars in development time by removing the need for each accelerator project to start from scratch as was the case prior to the development of EPICS. The proposed project aims to extend these benefits to the integrated accelerator and beamline environment.