MOTIVATION

The Swiss Light Source (SLS) is a synchrotron light source located at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Switzerland. Its most major component, a 2.4 GeV electron storage ring, was recently commissioned and is now delivering light of high brilliance to experimenters from multiple disciplines. Several high-level beam dynamics (BD) applications have been developed for the operation and monitoring of the SLS accelerator facilities. Fig.  captures typical components required by BD applications. Their number and demand on computer resources motivated, in part, a desire for a distribued computing environment. To this end, the Common Object Request Broker (CORBA), an emerging standard for distributed object computing (DOC), has been employed. Its use at the SLS has allowed us to realize the potential benefits of distributed computing and to simultaneously exploit features inherent to CORBA, such as the interoperability between objects of different race (language) and creed (platform). Complex tasks, such as the modeling of the SLS accelerators, can thus be handled by dedicated computers, and developed into reusable components that can be accessed through remote method invocations. Perservering with the notion of DOC and developing the entire suite of BD components as CORBA objects, further elevates the level

Figure: DOC components serving BD applications

at which applications are designed and implemented. Platforms hosting high-level software applications are no longer limited to the libraries and extensions available to the host operating system as the introduction of a CORBA middleware layer serves to extend the developers chosen programming language. BD application developers are, henceforth, able to focus on the specifics of the application at hand, such as determining user-friendly graphical interfaces, rather than struggle with the intricate internals of numerous application program interfaces (APIs) and low-level communication protocols.