Contents 1 Lansce Control System History
LAMPF (Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility), as LANSCE was called until the late 90's, was one of the first major accelerators to be designed in the 60's for computerized control. The original control computer was a System Engineering Laboratory SEL 840. All access to accelerator data was through a locally designed, centralized system with remote acquisition and control hardware called RICE (Remote Instrumentation and Control). From the beginning the control system was in a continuous state of modifications. CAMAC devices were added to the system to complement RICE. By 1978 the control system provided access to approximately 4000 command-able devices and ~ 12,000 data points. Roughly ninety percent of these devices were accessed through RICE and roughly ten percent through CAMAC (local, serial, and remote). In the early 80's, the SEL 840, which used discrete-component DTL logic, was not manufactured anymore and we began a program to replace it with a dual VAX 11/780 cluster. The cluster computers were continuously updated throughout the 80's and 90's. In the late 90's we finished installing the cluster of five VAX 4000–96 workstations that are still in use today. In the early 1990's we began integrating EPICS into the LANSCE control system During a control room upgrade new Sun workstations running Solaris 2.6 were introduced. These six-headed machines displayed the operator interface screens connected to EPICS applications and also interfaced to the VAX-based applications through X-windows technology. It is important to note that most of the recent upgrades and modifications were made on a small and tight budget that usually was considered “spare money.”
