SOFTWARE STRUCTURE AND REAL-TIME SIGNAL EXCHANGE FOR THE ASDEX UPGRADE TOKAMAK CONTROL SYSTEM

The toroidal magnetic confinement experiment ASDEX Upgrade investigates hot plasma performance and scalings in preparation of a thermonuclear fusion reactor. A new distributed real-time control has been designed for the device based on PCs and workstations under VxWorks and Solaris. As scientific progress requires frequent modification of algorithms, the system must provide flexibility to select specific sets of application processes (AP) and place these on target processors providing the necessary performance. For efficient information exchange between APs a shared memory layer for real-time signals, consisting of local ring buffers and shared memory hardware, has been developed which encapsulates signal routing and administration. The universal approach with free allocation of APs onto target processors combined with transparent real-time signal communication provides a flexible, reliable and efficient runtime infrastructure for general purposes