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APECS 2.0 Upgrading the APEX Control System

Explore the history, development, and changes in the APECS Control System at APEX Observatory. Training highlights and key components are discussed. Learn about interfaces, pipelines, and design aspects.

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APECS 2.0 Upgrading the APEX Control System

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  1. Dirk Muders, Heiko Hafok, MPIfR, Bonn APECS 2.0Upgrading the APEX Control System • APECS History • APECS 2.0 Development • The Upgrade Jan. 2009 • Changes compared to APECS 1.1 APECS = Atacama Pathfinder Experiment Control System APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09

  2. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 APECS Origins • ALMA Test Interferometer Control Software (TICS) was immediately usable at APEX due to common hardware interface (CAN bus to Vertex ACU/PTC computers) • Decided to re-use ALMA Common Software (ACS) and TICS and to benefit from large development team (a dozen people at the time in the year 2000) • Hoped for astronomer interfaces, but things developed differently...

  3. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 TICS • TICS provides CORBA access to the antenna via ACS components to set up observing patterns • These components run under VxWorks to fulfill the real-time CAN bus protocol • Testing the ALMA prototypes was performed mainly via low-level Python scripts using those components directly • A higher-level user interface was planned, but it was not implemented during the test activities

  4. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 What else was needed for APE(X)CS ? • To use ACS and TICS at APEX all our devices (instruments, auxiliary hardware, etc.) needed to be represented as CORBA components • An astronomer-friendly user interface to set up typical sub-mm observing scans • An online calibration pipeline was required to provide data products for astronomers

  5. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 APECS Component Interface • In contrast to ALMA, APEX was always supposed to have many different instruments (receivers and spectrometers), facility and PI • Thus we decided to define generic high-level instrument interfaces to be used by all devices of the same kind • This facilitates the setup of observations enormously

  6. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 SCPI Interface Level • The low-level hardware control systems could not use CORBA directly (ACS footprint was too large; CORBA programming is complex (even in ACS)) • Use SCPI (Standard Commands for Programmable Instrumentation) ASCII protocol via sockets to communicate between CORBA components and hardware controllers • SCPI command hierarchy is equivalent to ACS component name space (e.g. APEX:HET345:LO1:MULTI2:biasMode)

  7. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 SCPI Communication • Decoupling of CORBA and hardware controllers proved to be extremely useful because • it isolates APECS from hardware which is developed by many different groups • it allows to plug in simple emulator scripts to simulate a full system of instruments for APECS developments without real hardware • all CORBA components can be created fully automatically without any further manual interaction • the employed UDP socket protocol allows to debug hardware problems in many different ways

  8. APECS SCPI Setup ACS ORB ACS Container Real Hardware SCPI CORBA Component CORBA Simulated Hardware (emuEmbSys) SCPI

  9. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 Multi-Beam FITS (MBFITS) • The lack of a good format to store array receiver data of single-dish radio telescopes led to the development of the MBFITS raw data format • MBFITS stores the instrument and telescope data in a hierarchy of FITS files • MBFITS is now being used at APEX, Effelsberg and the IRAM 30m telescopes

  10. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 APECS Design • APECS is designed as a pipeline system starting with a scan description (“scan object”) and eventually leading to data products • The pipeline is coordinated by the central “Observing Engine” • Most APECS applications are written in Python, but they use a lot of compiled libraries to speed up computations and transactions • The astronomer interface is an IPython shell

  11. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 APECS' Astronomer CLI

  12. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 The APECS Pipeline • For each scan the Observing Engine accepts a Scan Object from a user CLI and • Sets up the receivers (tuning; amplifier calibration) • Configures the backends • Sets up auxiliary devices such as synthesizers, IF processors or the wobbler • Tells the telescope to move in the requested pattern • Starts and stops the data acquisition • Asks the Calibrator to process the raw data to produce the final data product or result

  13. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 The APECS Pipeline (ctd.) • All communications between the Observing Engine and devices or other high-level applications is done via ACS/CORBA

  14. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 APECS 0.1 • The first version of APECS was installed in Chile in September 2003 • Much of the time was spent on hardware installations (network, racks, servers) • We had to fight initial problems with failing pressurized hard disk boxes and missing infrastructure

  15. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 Initial APECS Installation (09/'03)

  16. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 Initial APECS Installation (09/'03)

  17. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 APECS 0.2-1.1 • Following the initial phase, APECS was debugged and extended a lot during the antenna and early instrument commissioning • We continued to deliver patches and new releases to provide control for more complex instruments and observing modes and to fix bugs • APECS 1.1 is still based on ACS 2.0.1 and runs on machines with RedHat Linux 7.2

  18. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 The APECS Upgrade • Why upgrade at all ? • Mainly the old Linux is making trouble • Data rates ever increase and new servers are needed to handle them • RH 7.2 can no longer be installed on them • In addition, ACS 2.0.1 has a number of known issues that have been cured in later versions • Old Linux libraries limit the development of new APECS applications

  19. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 APECS 2.0 Development • The upgrade plan already came up in 2004 • In an effort led by J. Ibsen, ALMA had ported TICS to ACS 3.0/4.0 • The plan was to stay with VxWorks since the ALMA RT Linux developments were still unstable • The ongoing APEX commissioning delayed our APECS porting • Only in 2007 we found the time to port the APECS and TICS codes to then ACS 5.0

  20. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 The VxWorks Drama • Unfortunately, we discovered bugs in the ACS property monitoring that required ACS 6.0.4 or higher to be used to avoid container crashes • But that ACS version no longer worked with VxWorks since the ACE/TAO libraries had become to big for the PowerPC architecture • A joint effort of ESO, UTFSM, the Keck Observatory, Remedy IT in the Netherlands and many hours of Bogdan's time reanimated VxWorks under then ACS 7.0.2 again in 2008

  21. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 APECS 2.0 Software • APECS 2.0 is based on ACS 8.0 and Scientific Linux 5.2 (this is ahead of ALMA who use SL 4.4 !) • Using an up-to-date ACS allows to benefit again from future ALMA developments and bug fixes • Most of the TICS and APECS functionality was kept aligned to APECS 1.1 • Some areas are more advanced in APECS 2.0 (e.g. Calibrator → Heiko’s presentation)

  22. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 APECS 2.0 Software (ctd.) • Basic operator / observer interfaces unchanged • Many improvements such as: • Jlog with automatic filter loading • New Qt GUI behavior (e.g. Calibrator Client) • New Qt widgets available • New Python (2.5) • New libraries (e.g. SciPy, NumPy) • New Gildas (12/2008) which fixes weighting errors when combining spectra

  23. APECS 2.0 Hardware APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09

  24. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 APECS 2.0 Deployment Control2 CORBA Services Observing Engine Abm CORBA Container with Antenna Components Antenna (ACU, PTC, WIU) CAN Bus CORBA Opt2 Frame Grabber Comp. DB2 Data Base Display2 FitsWriter Calibrator SCPI Instruments • Apexdev2 Observing Clients Monitoring Clients • Instruments2 CORBA Containers with Instr. Comp. • SCPI Parsers

  25. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 Software Changes [1] • Names of some variables have changed: • APEXROOT → APECSROOT • APEXCONFIG → APECSCONFIG • APEXSYSLOGS → APECSSYSLOGS • CORBA component name separator “/” instead of “:”, e.g. “APEX/RADIOMETER/RESULTS” • Component access (needs above syntax): • apexObsUtils.sc.get_device → apexObsUtils.sc.getComponentNonSticky

  26. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 Software Changes [2] • Property access compatible with APECS 1.1: • apexObsUtils.getMCPoint with arbitrary separator chosen from “/”, “:” and “.”, e.g. apexObsUtils.getMCPoint(‘APEX:HET345.state’) or apexObsUtils.getMCPoint(‘APEX.HET345/state’) • List of components: • apexObsUtils.sc.COBs_available → apexObsUtils.sc.availableComponents • Enums in MonitorQuery are now strings instead of integers (e.g. SHUTTER_OPEN)

  27. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 Software Changes [3] • Web scripts now need to run on “opt2” to fetch data from the DB2 (e.g. for the weather page) • Python wrapper for Gnuplot has been removed from SciPy. Use Pylab / matplotlib instead. • Observer account administration now on “apexdev2”

  28. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 Operational Changes [1] • Separate AMD maps to access /apexdata in Sequitor (lastarria:/apex_archive) and Chajnantor (display2:/apexdata) to minimize microwave link traffic. Initial reduction on “apexdev2”. Later maybe also on “display2”. • System VNC: control2:1 • Observing VNC(s): apexdev2:1 • Other VNC(s) (Wobb. GUI, SHFI, etc.): apexdev2:2/3/4 • Observing accounts only on “apexdev2”

  29. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 Operational Changes [2] • Jlog now automatically loads the right filter (“jlog_apecs”); just need to sort by time stamps • Syslogs are now split per hour to reduce link traffic • Syslogs can be loaded into “jlog” for inspection (“jlog –u $APECSSYSLOGS/APECS-<time stamp>.syslog.xml”)

  30. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 Operational Changes [3] • Two new accounts: • “apexops”: pointing & focus model, system source & line catalog administration in $APECSCONFIG • “apexdata”: raw & science data and obslog areas are owned by this account to avoid manipulations via the “apex” account whose password is not secret. The “apexdata” password must not be given to observers !!

  31. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 Operational Changes [4] • As a consequence the data production programs have to run under “apexdata” • This is accomplished by special scripts that use corresponding “ssh” and “sudo” commands: • fitsWriter start | stop | restart • onlineCalibrator start | stop | restart • obsLoggerServer start | stop | restart • obsEngine start | stop | restart (for convenience) • Do not use the old restart scripts ! • The overall system still runs under “apex” !!

  32. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 Operational Changes [5] • tycho, apexOptRun and MonitorQuery now to be run on “opt2” • DB2 entries now obey the complete naming hierarchy • “stopAllAPECSClients” now stops observer processes too. Always use “restartAPECSServers” which includes stopping the clients. Restart takes only 6 min. now ! • ABM console now via “minicom 1” on “opt2”

  33. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 Operational Changes [6] • Offline reductions at the MPIfR are now performed on “display2” (in Bonn) under the “apex” account. The data areas are mounted as /aux/apexa and /aux/apexb.

  34. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 New Network Setup • In addition to the new APECS hardware, the network has been upgraded to Gbit (reached 55 MB/s (!) for file transfers) and physically split into these subnets at Chajnantor: • Control (CORBA, SCPI): 10.0.2.* • Data (TCP streams fromt backends to FitsWriter on “display2-d”): 10.0.5.* (not routed !) • Maintenance (everything else: web cams, thin clients, notebooks, etc.) 10.0.6.* • Additional “SciOps” subnet for observational machines in Sequitor: 10.0.7.* (pular, etc.)

  35. Chajnantor Sequitor opt 2 Optical Camera Terminal to ABM Pointing Telescope Archive lastarria instruments2 instrument control rsync pular VNC client Hardware devices display2 FitsWriter Calibrator Control network, Data network Backends tacora VNC client control2 ObsEngine CORBA-Services VNCServer VNC Connections apexdev VNC client Telescope/Wobbler ABM apexdev2 Development APECS vncserver apexdb2 VNC client Monitoring Things WEB Cams tcserver Maintenance network

  36. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 APECS 2.0 Testing [1] • During the installation a number of tests have been made to verify the performance: • Initial drive tests: no strange motions / vibrations • Tracking tests at different az/el: like in APECS 1.1 • Optical pointing runs: agree with previous results • Radio scans with SHFI and SZ (calibration, pointing, focus, skydip, on, raster, otf (also holo mode), spiral raster) produced MBFITS and Class data as expected.

  37. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 APECS 2.0 Testing [2] • Throughput tests: • AFFTS with 28 x 8192 channels @ 10 Hz (8.75 MB/s !) without delays or other problems • SZ beam maps (which failed in Nov. 2008) with 141 subscans, OTF, continuous data (i.e. one 25 minute subscan !) without problems • PBEs and SZ backend are already in the data network. Spectrometers will be changed by B. Klein during his next visit

  38. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 Issues • APECS 2.0 is good, but not perfect: • ABM NC tasks (az/el & wobbler pos.) crashes sometimes. Being iterated with B. Jeram (ACS). • optView GUI freezes after “movie” mode • Gildas as of 12/2008 has some bugs. Will need to update to a more recent version soon. • Cron jobs handling syslogs need to be adjusted.

  39. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 APEX Staff To Do List • All Linux machines in Sequitor should be updated to SL 5.2 • At least “llaima” should be available for offline data reduction with SL 5.2 and APECS 2.0 soon • The LDAP and DNS services need to be moved to new servers (ideally off of normal PCs) • The remaining web cams etc. need to be reconfigured to the maintenance subnet • Port “fieldtalk” programs for optical camera to SL 5.2

  40. APECS 2.0 Training, APEX / ESO, Jan. '09 Conclusions • APECS 2.0 with new network performs much better than the previous system • We are no longer bound to very old hardware and can fulfill requirements of new instruments • Observing modes that started failing last year are now possible again • New observing modes with higher data rates can now be used • Future developments facilitated by new Linux / libraries.

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