SwissFEL is a new free electron laser facility at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Switzerland. Commissioning started in 2016 and resulted in first lasing in December 2016 (albeit not on the design energy). In 2017, the commissioning continued and will result in the first pilot experiments at the end of the year. The close interaction of experiment and accelerator components as well as the pulsed electron beam required a well thought out integration of the control system including some new concepts and layouts. This paper presents the current status of the control system together with some lessons learned.

SwissFEL Control System - Overview, Status, and Lessons Learned

The SwissFEL beam-synchronous data-acquisition system is based on several novel concepts and technologies. It is targeted on immediate data availability and online processing and is capable of assembling an overall data view of the whole machine, thanks to its distributed and scalable back-end. Load on data sources is reduced by immediately streaming data as soon as it becomes available. The streaming technology used provides load balancing and fail-over by design. Data channels from various sources can be efficiently aggregated and combined into new data streams for immediate online monitoring, data analysis and processing. The system is dynamically configurable, various acquisition frequencies can be enabled, and data can be kept for a defined time window. All data is available and accessible enabling advanced pattern detection and correlation during acquisition time. Accessing the data in a code-agnostic way is also possible through the same REST API that is used by the webfrontend. We will give an overview of the design and specialities of the system as well as talk about the findings and problems we faced during machine commissioning.

SwissFEL - Beam Synchronous Data Acquisition - The First Year

Recently, the installation of the components for the free electron laser SwissFEL has started at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI). In March 2016, beginning of the injector commissioning is planned and first lasing is foreseen a year later. New hardware, like VME64x-boards (IFC 1210, an P2020 based intelligent FPGA controller from IOxOS) and -crates (Trenew), timing system (from MRF with advanced features), motion controllers (Power PMAC from Delta Tau, and MDrive from Schneider), among others, as well as modern field buses, pose great challenges to the controls team. The close interaction of machineand experiment-components require advanced software concepts for data-acquisition, -distribution, and archiving. An overview of the project will be presented and the different HW and SW solutions based on the experience gained from preliminary implementations at other facilities of PSI will be explained. First results of the HW commissioning at the SwissFEL will be reported.

Colin Edward Higgs

Papers

SwissFEL Control System - Overview, Status, and Lessons Learned

Overview and Status of the SwissFEL Project at PSI