Beamline-Controls Workshop working-group session synopsis

[mooney@oxygen.aps1.anl.gov (Tim Mooney)]

Dear folks,
   Here are my notes on what transpired during the working-group sessions
(on Friday March 18th) of the Beamline Controls Workshop.  Please comment
to correct any misstatements or misinterpretations, and to add your own
recollections.

Thanks everyone for producing an atmosphere in which real issues could
be discussed frankly, and for the generally collaborative tone you
brought to the workshop.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To begin the working-group sessions, John Quintana (DND-CAT) presented
a list of study group topics distilled from informal discussions among
workshop attendees.  Five topics were described and agreed on, and
attendees of the working-group sessions staffed groups (mostly) of
volunteers to study the topics, to identify opportunities for
standardization and collaborative development, and to propose standards
where appropriate.

Working-group attendees agreed unanimously, but with some reservations,
to promote the use of EPICS in beamline-control software wherever that
use is reasonable, rather than to develop software that would reproduce
functionality available in EPICS.  Expressed reservations concerned the
reliance of EPICS on the VxWorks operating system, the level of fine
control over hardware achievable under EPICS, the robustness of
connections between workstation software and crate-resident hardware
controllers, and the looseness of the word 'reasonable'.

In other discussions, working-group members made the following
recommendations:

- Study groups should meet early in May '94 (in addition to their
informal 'meetings' via email) and to report to the Beamline Controls
Committee (chair: Mark Rivers) of the Research Directorate at the 1994
APS User's Meeting.

- The developer community is to produce demonstrations of
beamline-control software for presentation at the 1994 APS User's
Meeting.

- The APS should maintain an email listserver specifically for beamline
controls, and to subscribe all workshop attendees to the list.
(The list is 'beamline_controls@aps.anl.gov'.  For information, send a
blank message to 'listserv@epics.aps.anl.gov'.)

- The APS should maintain an anonymous-ftp server for distribution of
beamline-control software.
(The ftp directory is pub/beamline_controls on epics.aps.anl.gov.)

- The APS should maintain an EPICS server for use by CAT software
developers, to which developers can login and run EPICS.
(The server is dumond.aps1.anl.gov.  For access to this system, talk to
Tim Mooney (mooney@oxygen.aps1.anl.gov))

- The APS/XFD Beamline Controls group should take responsibility for
CAT training in EPICS.

The following study groups were formed:

Beamline Hardware
-----------------
Purpose: to identify hardware currently supported by EPICS, and to propose
hardware standards.
Members: Karen Coulter, Grant Bunker, Dave Reid, Steve Heald, Gerd
Rosenbaum.

Communication and Information Dissemination
-------------------------------------------
Purpose: to facilitate communication among beamline-control software developers.
Members: Mohan Ramanathan, Harvey Rarback, Karen Coulter, Tim Mooney, Bill
McDowell.

Liason to the EPICS Collaboration
---------------------------------
Purpose: to convey the CAT development community to the EPICS collaboration.
Members: Karen Coulter, Tim Mooney, John Quintana, Dave Reid, Joe Sullivan,
Mark Engbretson.

Data-format Standardization
---------------------------
Purpose: to study existing data-format standards, and to propose one for
beamline-control software.
Members: Gerry Swislow, Mark Rivers, Malcolm Capel, Pathikrit Bandyopadhyay,
Guy Jennings, John Quintana.

Commonality
-----------
Purpose: to identify attributes of beamline-control systems amenable to
standardization, and to propose appropriate software standards.
Members: Mohan Ramanathan, Grant Bunker, Mark Rivers, Tim Mooney, Bakul
Bannerjee, Pathikrit Bandyopadhyay, Jonathan Schug, Gerry Swislow,
Karen Coulter, Hawoong Hong, Ian McNulty, Brian Rodericks.
This group is include three subgroups separately considering the
following applications:
	Diffraction, Scattering, and Crystallography - chair: John Quintana
	EXAFS, Spectroscopy - chair: Grant Bunker
	Other (Imaging, Tomography, Time-Resolved, etc.) - chair: Ian McNulty

Tim Mooney