Building highly available control system applications with Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture and open standards

Requirements for modern and future control systems for large projects like International Linear Collider demand high availability for control system components. Recently telecom industry came up with a great open hardware specification – Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (ATCA). This specification is aimed for better reliability, availability and serviceability. Since its first market appearance in 2004, ATCA platform has shown tremendous growth and proved to be stable and well represented by a number of vendors. ATCA is an industry standard for highly available systems. On the other hand Service Availability Forum, a consortium of leading communications and computing companies, describes interaction between hardware and software. SAF defines a set of specifications such as Hardware Platform Interface, Application Interface Specification. SAF specifications provide extensive description of highly available systems, services and their interfaces. Originally aimed for telecom applications, these specifications can be used for accelerator controls software as well. This study describes benefits of using these specifications and their possible adoption to accelerator control systems. It is demonstrated how EPICS Redundant IOC was extended using Hardware Platform Interface specification, which made it possible to utilize benefits of the ATCA platform.