Recent developments of the RFX control and data acquisition system

Although the new RFX machine is still under modification, most power supply systems have been used since early 2003 for testing an ITER high-power by-pass switch. This has given us the opportunity to verify the effectiveness of several choices we made in the development of the new data acquisition and control system of RFX.

The system has been renewed both in its control and data acquisition components. For control, the new system employs Simatic S7 PLCs and a commercial Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) tool. Many improvements have been made to the MDSplus-based data acquisition system. The whole system has been ported from OpenVMS to Linux, using a server for data storage and CAMAC data acquisition, and a set of CompactPCI crates, each hosting a Linux PC board. Device-specific code is now entirely implemented in TDI, the scripting language of MDSplus. Our experience in the new system has been positive, especially for the data acquisition system.