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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
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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.
Next: The CORBA Architecture
Up: ON THE USE OF
Previous: ON THE USE OF
Jan Chrin
2001-11-09