HIGH-SPEED DATA HANDLING USING REFLECTIVE MEMORY THREAD FOR TOKAMAK PLASMA CONTROL
S. Y. Park, S.H. Hahn, W. C. Kim, Korea B. G. Penaflor, Robert David Johnson, D.A. Piglowski, Michael L. Walker · 2011
The Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR)[1] plasma control system (PCS) is defined as a system consisting of electronic devices and control software, which identifies and diagnoses various plasma parameters and calculates appropriate control signals to each actuator to keep the plasma sustained in the KSTAR operation regime. The KSTAR PCS consists of a linux system with 8 processors and both analog and digital data acquisition methods are adapted for fast realtime data acquisition up to 20 kHz. The digital interface uses a reflective memory (RFM) technology to share data among various subsystems of KSTAR. RFM technology has been adopted as the real time communication method to enable PCS to interface with the actuators and to do interprocessor communications inside the cluster. To handle the fast control of the RFM data transfer, the communication using the RFM with the actuators and diagnostics system is implemented as a thread which is assigned to a separate process.