National Ignition Facility Integrated Computer Control System

The NIF design team is developing the Integrated Computer Control System (ICCS), which is based on an object-oriented software framework applicable to event-driven control systems. The framework provides an open, extensible architecture that is sufficiently abstract to construct future mission-critical control systems. The ICCS will become operational when the first 8 out of 192 beams are activated in mid 2000. The ICCS consists of 300 front-end processors attached to 60,000 control points coordinated by a supervisory system. Computers running either Solaris or VxWorks are networked over a hybrid configuration of switched fast Ethernet and asynchronous transfer mode (ATM). ATM carries digital motion video from sensors to operator consoles. Supervisory software is constructed by extending the reusable framework components for each specific application. The framework incorporates services for database persistence, system configuration, graphical user interface, status monitoring, event logging, scripting language, alert management, and access control. More than twenty collaborating software applications are derived from the common framework. The framework is interoperable among different kinds of computers and functions as a plug-in software bus by leveraging a common object request brokering architecture (CORBA). CORBA transparently distributes the software objects across the network Because: of the pivotal role played, CORBA was tested to ensure adequate performance.