Report on the PCaPAC 2000 Workshop

Abstract

In October 2000, the third PCaPAC (PCs and Particle Accelerator Controls) workshop took place at DESY. This paper presents a summary of the workshop. The workshop reviewed existing and new PC-based accelerator control systems, from small-scale to large-scale installations. It demonstrated convincingly the advantage of modern, commercial mass-market products used for accelerator controls. Disadvantages of these technologies were reported as well. Large-scale PC systems inherently bring administrative concerns into the picture. In this vein, special emphasis was given to system administration for distributed systems. A major topic of the workshop was the integration of different control system approaches as well as the integration of different platforms within the same control system. In particular, PC-based concepts offer the simple opportunity to interface to commercial SCADA systems. In addition, large emphasis was given to the presentation of future developments including the next network trends to data exchange via SOAP and XML.