Design and Development of a Diagnostics Client for a Beam Loss ...

Design and Development of a Diagnostics Client for a Beam Loss Measurement System at CERN
2. SCOPE OF THE ASSIGNMENT
The scope of this assignment includes designing, developing, maintaining and supporting
the client application for the BLM Dual Polarity (BLEDP) modules.
2.1 Necessary requirements upon the software architecture
The necessary requirements upon the software architecture include the following tasks:
• Communicating with the custom made server, implemented in the BLEDP FPGA,
through the network. Each module has a separate Ethernet link and thus it is ad-
dressed individually by its unique address and port number. Each server is limited
to accept only one client at a time. At this step it is necessary to decide which pro-
tocol (TCP/IP or UDP/IP) is suitable for the project’s needs. The foreseen data rate
should be taken into account.
• Commanding the server. After establishing connection with the server, the client
should be able to send a command packet. There are two types of commands in
the system. The first group of commands contains details of the acquisition request.
There are also expert commands which can be sent to the server in order to set its
internal registers. At this point a protocol for the commanding should be designed.
• Data sorting and processing. The server can send both mixed acquisition and status
data. The protocol should be designed, so that the data type can be distinguished
and processed accordingly.
• Displaying in real time two different types of data, acquisition and status, for diag-
nostics purposes. This is the main function of the application and the final goal of
the development process.
• Storing the acquired data -in parallel with the real time view- into files for further
offline analysis. The logic for the file storing follows a specific format, so it will be
easier for the user to find a precise time frame from a previous acquisition.
• Designing the graphical user interface. The application must be user friendly. In
order to achieve this goal it should group functionalities of a given category in a sep-
arate tab. It should also allow online real time data viewing and optional storage
in the offline files. The online viewing of the acquisition and status data should be
implemented by use of separate tabs. The file structure for the offline data should be
proposed as well. The offline data analysis tool should be designed within the ap-
plication. This stage of development makes use of the Java Swing framework. This
framework provides a set of powerful and flexible components, which synthesize the
look and feel of modern Java GUI applications.
• High data rate. The application will receive data stream at a high data rate (16 kbps
in single-channel mode and 128 kbps in multi-channel mode). To manage online
Emmanouil I. Angelogiannopoulos 14