How open design solutions are going to affect particle accelerators controls and diagnostics: The Elettra case

The effective management of several distributed devices, even in real time, is one of the mandatory conditions for the design, operation and upgrade of modern particle accelerators control systems. In order to cope with the performance demanded by such plants, the existing equipment has to be continuously improved or new strategies have to be considered to overcome its limitations. The impressive capability growth of mobile and handheld devices allows moving from a traditional distributed architecture, based on complex and expensive operating nodes, to a pervasive approach based on simple and cheap embedded systems, tailored for each specific application. Such pervasive trend is further favored by the open design approach, which is becoming more and more popular as it enables designers to easily adapt an already existing board to their specific needs. In this communication a brief description of Elettra and FERMI light sources in the context of controls, diagnostics and power supplies is given. The main applications developed and successfully deployed on the accelerators and based on a commercial open design embedded board are also presented.