  The Integrated Computer Control System (ICCS) for the National Ignition
Facility (NIF) is a layered architecture of 300 front-end processors (FEP)
coordinated by supervisor subsystems including automatic beam alignment and
wavefront control, laser and target diagnostics, pulse power, and shot control
timed to 30 ps. FEP computers incorporate either VxWorks on PowerPC or Solaris
on UltraSPARC processors that interface to over 45,000 control points attached
to VME-bus or PCI-bus crates respectively. Typical devices are stepping motors,
transient digitizers, calorimeters, and photodiodes. The front-end layer is
divided into another segment comprised of an additional 14,000 control points
for industrial controls including vacuum, argon, synthetic air, and safety
interlocks implemented with Allen-Bradley programmable logic controllers
(PLCs). The computer network is augmented asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) that
delivers video streams from 500 sensor cameras monitoring the 192 laser beams
to operator workstations. Software is based on an object-oriented framework
using CORBA distribution that incorporates services for archiving, machine
configuration, graphical user interface, monitoring, event logging, scripting,
alert management, and access control. Software coding using a mixed language
environment of Ada95 and Java is one-third complete at over 300 thousand source
lines. Control system installation is currently under way for the first 8
beams, with project completion scheduled for 2008.

Software Engineering