USING MEMCAHED AS REAL-TIME DATABASE IN THE SPARC CONTROL SYSTEM
G. Di Pirro · 2012
The first implementation of the SPARC control system was based on a distributed TCP/IP data server: each frontend CPU had its own server to distribute data to the console. We decided to move the system to a NoSQL key value database. We decided to use an open source database Memcached. This is a database that is high performance key-value cache optimized for speed only. For this reason we could use memcached not for storing data, but as a channel of communication between frontend processors and consoles. The first object that we have installed is the camera system. We chose this class of elements because the amount of data is high; cameras are at least 640x480 with 8 bit. In this first installation we made some speed test: we increased the speed transfer and the data transfer is now independent from the number of high level CPUs that are using the same image. The success of this installation convinced us to bring the entire data transfer of SPARC control system to use Memcahed as data server.