New development of SGII-UP laser facility control system based on tango controls

Abstract

The SGII-UP laser facility is currently undergoing an upgrade from early 2022 to increase the energy output and support direct-driver double-cone ignition fusion experiments. This upgrade requires broad changes to the existing control system. Since the first beam, the SGII-UP laser facility has been driven by a control system built by a few decentralised computers, and with the growing scale of the facility and the need for a physics experiment operation, the existing control system no longer meets the requirements of the operation.The novel control system is built around the Tango Controls, and it is a great challenge to apply Tango Controls to this high-power laser facility, which includes eight kilojoule-class nanosecond laser beams and one picosecond petawatt laser beam. The system employs a hierarchical structure that comprises device, service and GUI layers, and these implement communication via a unified Tango communication protocol interface. Physical devices of subsystems are encapsulated into virtual device services, which are processes implementing a set of device classes. This encapsulation allows easy access to data, while hiding the complex set of instructions for physical devices. The service layer collects data from the device services, processes them, and sends commands to physical devices. Based on Tango's interface, client GUIs are developed under QT. The flexibility of communication using the Tango protocol allows multiple access to the device.