Computing/Controls

Each user group gets an account at the beamline file server. The account allows the login at the beamline consoles, login at generic PSI computers and access to the data from outside. PSI provides public WLAN. Laptops with active virus protection may be hooked up to the beamline LAN with DHCP.

Control of the beamline and experiment is fully implemented in EPICS. For data aquisition we support the sscan tool which allows multi-dimensional (up to 5d) scans of any process variables (PV) with up to 70 detectors per scan dimension. Users who want or need to use their own data aquisition system can do either:
  • install EPICS on your controls computer/ laptop- we can provide a rpm package for Scientific Linux 5 (Red Hat). This gives you the full functionality with direct read and write access to any PV either from the shell or from scripting languages like IDL, Matlab, perl, python...
  • call the channel access client programs at one of the beamline consoles via ssh. To use this option with a scripting language you have to setup passwordless login with shared keys.