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Contextual metadata becomes an important factor for the work with research data, which is created in large amounts at fusion experiments. In its first operational phases, the stellarator experiment Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) produces about 500 TB of experimental data in only a few weeks of scientific campaign. A new central logbook software was implemented for the processing of contextual metadata at W7-X. The bulk data of W7-X experiments can be enriched with additional information, such as comments and tags for categorizing. Since its introduction, many enhancements have been implemented based on user feedback. This was possible due to a flexible software architecture. By using the logbook REST API, users can integrate logbook requests into their own software and programmatically add new content. The logbook quickly became a crucial tool for W7-X operation and is now considered a central hub for all experiment-related information. This paper describes the implementation of the W7-X logbook and the experience with the integration of metadata via REST API.

In the past two campaigns of Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) stellarator the overview video diagnostics played a key role in the daily experiments. The current software implementations went through numerous improvements and changes according to the continuously changing requirements. However, while the control software could handle all the needs, the changes reached a point where the redesign and re-implementation became necessary to ensure high reliability. In the next campaign of W7-X real-time data streaming will be implemented to W7-X’s Archive, which can be practically a limitless real-time data backup. Other improvements involve high-level interaction with the trigger-time-event (TTE) network, intense graphical user interface (GUI) improvements such as the grouping of cameras, visual display of measurement settings (e.g. exposure and readout timing). This new software package is arranged into two standalone pieces, similarly as in the previous version. One of the main upgrades is that the software will be able to send so-called event descriptions over the network during the measurement to a central event display, where events from several diagnostics will be visualized. This feature can provide essential information for machine operators, as they can visually monitor dangerous events inside the machine in real-time. This paper will present the detailed experiences, new requirements and detailed design, implementation and testing of this new software package.

The stellarator Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) is a fusion device designed for steady state operation. It is a complex technical system. To cope with the complexity a modular, component-based control and data acquisition system has been developed. During operation phases of W7-X components steadily evolve. For instance, measurement devices for diagnostics are improved, technical processes are optimized, experienced limits of the machine have to be taken into account or simple “bug fixing” is done. This requires continuous further development of the components while operating them at W7-X – a typical use case for DevOps practices. DevOps is a software engineering practice. The term is a compound of development and operations. It aims at shorter development cycles, while the quality of the changed system must stay at a high level. This is achieved by using a highly automated tool chain.

Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) completed its second operation phase in December 2017. A large number of diagnostics were operated in nearly 1000 experiment programs (XP) by an international research team. For the documentation of W7-X XPs, a new electronic logbook software has been developed. The software has been designed for the needs of W7-X researchers and engineers: a web-based logbook application for the entire team. For an effective documentation, large parts of the logbook content comes from automatically generated logs, complemented by the team members via web browser or REST API. The W7-X control software generates log entries for an XP during program execution. This includes automatic extraction of configuration information from the planned program, which is later represented as searchable tags within the logbook. In addition, users can add supplementary tags and rich-text comments to all logs. The logbook allows full-text search and range queries for numeric values: both with millisecond response times. A dedicated web page for each XP log contains overview plots from measurement data, generated on the fly from archived data. Separate component logs are created in the same way for diagnostics and machine sub-systems for different use cases, e.g., XPs, standalone tests, or calibrations. The logbook hosts separate pages for device operation and the W7-X components, providing status information and additional features. In this way it effectively supports the operation of W7-X.

W endelstein 7-X is, as a stellerator, in principle capable of very long operation. The Control and Data-acquisition ( codac ) systems around w7x have, therefore, been designed for continuous operation. One aspect of this design is the recording of the absolute time of every measurement. Whereby for every relevant event, such as every sample-clock tick of every adc , the time is recorded as a 64 bit integer value. On the one hand, this approach has several advantages. On the other hand, it generates much more data to process and archive. In extreme cases it can lead to a multiplication of the data amounts. Compression of these time-stamps data can be expected to save storage and network resources. However, even though most of these time-stamps have a high degree of predictability, the normal, de-facto standard, compression approaches ( zip , flac , etc.) perform rather poorly on this type of data. Thus, inspired by well-known audio compression approaches, we developed a specialised loss-less compression algorithm, aimed at fairly constantly incrementing 64 bit long-integers. Experiments on data collected in the past demonstrate very large compression factors, whilst retaining all details in the timing data.

MobileCoDaC is a test bed allowing in situ testing and commissioning the control and data acquisition of components to be operated at Wendelstein 7-X. It is a minimized replica of the functionality of the complete W7-X CoDaC infrastructure and can be operated independently. MobileCoDaC contains a set of W7-X CoDaC servers, network infrastructure, and accessories for remote access. All hardware is mounted in a single transportable rack system. Moreover, it provides the software infrastructure and user applications for experiment preparation, experiment operation, trouble shooting and experiment data access. MobileCoDaC has been operated successfully for test and commissioning of the control and data acquisition of the HEXOS (high efficiency extreme ultraviolet overview spectrometer) diagnostic at Forschungszentrum Julich.

Wendelstein 7-X was built for the research on steady state operation of stellarators. This sets high requirements on the control and data acquisition (CoDaC) system, with the archive database as one of its main components. W7-X Archive database is the storage of all operational and scientific data. It stores raw data as well as processed data and provides a single database for a wide range of components and data types. The Archive WEB API provides a unified access to the archive database by using web service technologies. The API is based on the REST architecture style, using HTTP as the application protocol: the data is represented as a unified signal resource, which can be addressed via a URL. The users can read data in standard formats, like JSON or PNG. In the same way, the WEB API can be used to import new data to ArchiveDB. This paper describes the concepts of the WEB API and the experiences during the first operational phase of W7-X.

The Wendelstein 7-X steady state plasma control and data acquisition system has been successfully commissioned and well established to investigate the plasma startup and run the first complex physics programs during the initial operation phase of W7-X. The main components of W7-X and a set of operational diagnostics have been integrated into the CoDaC system. The various different requests from the experimenters could be satisfied using the well established set of tools and interfaces − demonstrating their qualification for continuous operation. This paper summarizes the workflow from the users’ point of view while presenting the main tools and interfaces for W7-X Segment Control.

Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) is a superconducting stellarator having undergone the first experimental campaign after its construction. It is capable of steady state magnetic field operation. After an upgrade to cope with permanent heat loads of several Megawatts, W7-X will be able to run steady state discharges, too. The W7-X control system demonstrated to support all types of experiments compatible with steady state magnetic field operation, i.e. short plasma discharges and sequences of discharges with arbitrary time intervals. The contribution describes the basic concepts of the W7-X control system. Application examples are presented and discussed. Further planned extensions to the control systems are presented.

The superconducting stellarator Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) is a fusion device, which is capable of steady state operation. Furthermore W7-X is a very complex technical system. To cope with these requirements a modular and strongly hierarchical component-based control and data acquisition system has been designed. The behavior of W7-X is characterized by thousands of technical parameters of the participating components. The intended sequential change of those parameters during an experiment is defined in an experiment program. Planning such an experiment program is a crucial and complex task. To reduce the complexity an abstract, more physics-oriented high-level layer has been introduced earlier. The so-called high-level (physics) parameters are used to encapsulate technical details. This contribution will focus on the extension of this layer to a high-level component model. It completely describes the behavior of a component for a certain period of time. It allows not only defining simple value ranges but also complex dependencies between physics parameters. This can be: dependencies within components, dependencies between components or temporal dependencies. Component models can now be analyzed to generate various views of an experiment. A first implementation of such an analyze process is already finished. A graphical preview of a planned discharge can be generated from a chronological sequence of component models. This allows physicists to survey complex planned experiment programs at a glance.

The new quality of the superconducting fusion device Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) is its potential of steady state operation. W7-X is also a very complex technical system. In these two aspects W7-X compares to other super conducting fusion devices (ITER, KSTAR, EAST, SST-1, Tore Supra, JT-60SA, and LHD). The modular and strongly hierarchical control, data acquisition, and communication (CoDaC) system has been designed to cope with these two aspects, unprecedented for the control systems used by most operating fusion devices. The CoDaC system for W7-X will be thoroughly tested in a prototype installation at the WEGA stellarator in order to minimize the risks before commissioning. WEGA is a classical stellarator which allows steady state plasma pulses at a magnetic field of 0.06 T. WEGA can run pulses up to 20 s at a magnetic field up to 0.5 T. Despite its lesser complexity WEGA has the same main components as W7-X, e.g. magnetic coil systems and ECRH. It is therefore considered to be a suitable test-bed for the control system. This paper focuses on discharges controlled by the new control system and the enhanced surveillance mechanisms introduced during the first year of operation. It shows characteristic curves for the key control parameters of the major components. Taking additionally dependencies and constraints between and within components into account a segmented discharge for each experiment is presented as result.

Future fusion experiments, aiming to demonstrate steady state reactor operation, require physics driven plasma control based on increasingly complex plasma models. A precondition for establishing such control systems is widely automated data analysis, which can provide integration of multiple diagnostic on a large scale. Even high quality online data evaluation, which is essential for the scientific documentation of the experiment, has to be performed automatically due to the huge data sets being recorded in long discharge runs. An automated system that can handle these requirements will have to be built on reusable software components that can be maintained by the domain experts: diagnosticians, theorists, engineers and others. For Wendelstein 7-X a service oriented architecture seems to be appropriate, in which software components can be exposed as services with well defined interface contracts. Although grid computing has up to now been mainly used for remote job execution, a more promising service oriented middleware has emerged from the recent grid specification, the open grid service architecture (OGSA). It is based on stateful web services defined by the web service resource framework (WSRF) standard. In particular, the statefulness of services allows to setup complex models without unnecessary performance losses by frequent transmission of large and complex data sets. At present, the usability of this technology in the W7-X CoDaC context is under evaluation by first service implementations.

Retrieval of scientific data at large fusion experiments is an important but surprisingly complicated task. There are many different data storage systems that have to be accessed using different software interfaces on varying platforms. With MDS+ a respectable approach towards a more standardised and simplified data access interface was started. However, it has its drawbacks regarding continuously acquired data and provides a whole data storage system rather than only an interface, which is not always demanded. Therefore, a data access interface based on service oriented technologies has been developed aiming for a more standardised and platform independent solution. The contribution will describe the current status of this development. It will explain the interface itself including the WSDL (Web Service Description Language) definition and show currently existing service implementations for the Wendelstein 7-X and the Wendelstein 7-AS data storage systems. Furthermore different possibilities to access the services on the client side will be discussed.

The new quality of the superconducting fusion device Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) is its capability of steady state operation. Additionally the fusion device W7-X is a very complex technical system. The modular and strongly hierarchical control system has been designed to cope with these two requirements unique for fusion devices. To minimize the risks before commissioning the control and data acquisition system at W7-X it will be thoroughly tested in a prototype installation at the WEGA stellarator. WEGA is a classical stellarator which allows steady state plasma pulses at a magnetic field of 0.5 T. Despite its lesser complexity WEGA has the same main components, e.g. magnetic coil systems, ECRH, and diagnostics as W7-X and is therefore considered to be a suitable test-bed for the control system. The installation of the new W7-X like control and data acquisition system has been finished in March this year. Individual components of the control system have already been commissioned during the installation phase. In April final commissioning and testing of the complete system took place. First discharges fully controlled by the prototype control system have been realized. The contribution will focus on first discharges controlled by the new system. Furthermore it presents first experiences that will incorporate into the further development of the control system and the tools for planning, preparation, and realization of plasma discharges.

The W7-X experiment of the IPP, under construction in Greifswald Germany, is designed to operate in a quasi-steady-state scenario. The database structures and interfaces used for discharge description and execution have to reflect this continuous mode of operation. In close collaboration between the control group of W7-X and the data acquisition group a combined design of the data structures used for describing the configuration and the operation of the experiment was developed. To guarantee access to this information from all participating stations a TCP/IP portal and a proxy server were developed. This portal enables especially the VxWorks real-time operating systems of the control stations to access the information in the object-oriented database. The database schema includes now a more functional description of the experiment and gives the physicists a more simplified view of the necessary definitions of operational parameters. The scheduling of the long discharges of W7-X will be done by predefining operational parameters in segments and scenarios, where a scenario is a fixed sequence of segments with a common physical background. To hide the specialized information contained in the basic parameters from the experiment leader or physicist an abstraction layer was introduced that only shows physically interesting information. An executable segment will be generated after verifying the consistency of the high-level parameters by using a transformation function for every basic parameter needed. Since the database contains all configurations and discharge definitions necessary to operate the experiment, it is very important to give the user a tool to manipulate this information in an intuitive way. A special editor (ConfiX) was designed and implemented for this task. At the moment the basic functionality for dealing with all kind of objects in the database is available. Future releases will extend the functionality to defining and editing configurations, segments and scenarios with task-specific versions.

WENDELSTEIN 7-X is a long pulse experiment. One discharge may last up to 30 min and is segmented into many time intervals. A set of chained segments is called a scenario, and a few scenarios will make up the experiment program. For physical reasons segments of the experiment program must be available in a reasonable order. This means that physical programs need to be pre-planned and technical parameters need to be adjusted in the long run. All information necessary for this purpose is stored in the W7-X configuration database. To create, view and modify this information, an effective and user-friendly tool, the ConfiX editor, is needed. The ConfiX editor is a specialized editor for processing objects in the W7-X configuration database. It is used to prepare and describe the process of discharges. ConfiX is mainly used for three cases of application, namely to (1) define configurations, (2) prepare segment descriptions and (3) specify scenario descriptions. This contribution will give an overview of the purpose and functions of the ConfiX editor.

ITER, Wendelstein 7-X, LHD, and TORE SUPRA are experimental facilities designed to lead the way to steady state fusion devices. These experiments require strategies to sustain a discharge in case of unforeseen events, e.g. heat overloads of plasma facing components or the failure of a plasma heating source. A recovery strategy is needed to get the discharge back for physics exploitation. For this purpose the W7-X segment control framework provides means for automated event detection along with options to formulate and initiate a recovery strategy. Besides handling of failures and degradation there are events that represent a desired plasma physical effect. An example for this kind of event is a transition to from Low to High-Confinement mode. These events indicate that a certain plasma state is reached and scientific examination can be altered thus enabling event-driven multiple experiments per discharge. Examples of both kinds of events will be presented and compared to other approaches in the community.

For a complex experiment like W7X being subject to changes all along its projected lifetime the advantages of a formalized software development method have already been stated [1] . Quality standards like ISO/IEC-12207 provide a guideline for structuring of development work and improving process and product quality. A considerable number of tools has emerged supporting and automating parts of development work. On W7X progress has been made during the last years in exploiting the benefit of automation and management during software development: – Continuous build, integration and automated test of software artefacts. ∘ Syntax checks and code quality metrics. ∘ Documentation generation. ∘ Feedback for developers by temporal statistics. – Versioned repository for build products (libraries, executables). – Separate snapshot and release repositories and automatic deployment. – Semi-automatic provisioning of applications. – Feedback from testers and feature requests by ticket system. This toolset is working efficiently and allows the team to concentrate on development. The activity there is presently focused on increasing the quality of the existing software to become a dependable product. Testing of single functions and qualities must be simplified. So a restructuring is underway which relies more on small, individually testable components with standardized interfaces providing the capability to construct arbitrary function aggregates for dedicated tests of quality attributes as availability, reliability, performance. A further activity is on improving the development cycle. The use of release cycles has already provided favourable concentration of work and predictability of delivery times. However, the demand has risen, to react quickly on priority changes from W7X-project management. So a more agile development cycle is being prepared relying on smaller working packages, shorter release cycles and an associated release plan giving the software development responsible the possibility to react on a shorter time scale.

The set-up of experiment programs for the complex fusion device Wendelstein 7-X has to define a multitude of parameters which have to obey large number of rules arising from physics and technical constraints. Since this is hard to automate as long as the dependencies are not known sufficiently, the W7-X CoDaC team decided to implement an editor following a constructive approach: starting from an established experiment program the user is able to modify parts of it – thus complying the usual workflow of experimenters. Already the very first implementation has been deployed at the W7-X CoDaC prototype, the WEGA stellarator. Driven by agile programming principles the weighting of the requirements has been influenced by the editor usage in the daily experiment routine, thus ensuring client-oriented development steps and short release cycles. At present, a stable program editor implementation with graphical preview, immediate feedback on user actions and instantaneous warnings about incorrect settings is under continuous operation at the CoDaC prototype. It has potential to improve together with growing knowledge about the physical and technical constraints. The experiences gained give certainty that the editor is suitable for future use during the start-up phase and the first years of W7-X operation.

The long Wendelstein 7-X experiment programs will be segmented into arbitrary time slices. For each of these segments the planned behaviour is stored in a configuration database – and that for every component within the W7-X hierarchical layout. Up to now we have an editor to set up these segments for each single component. But generating the compound program description out of the components’ segments is time-consuming experts’ hand work. It is planned to implement a top-down program editor which is able to break down a high level physics program proposal to component segments while observing all the physical and technical constraints – a quite ambitious intention. This paper describes the first step to an experiment program editor: The “eXpress program editor” is able to modify parameters of a single, a subset, or all segments within a given program, thus adapting its behaviour in an easy way. A graphical program structure overview has been implemented giving fast access to program parameters for comparison and editing. Appropriate parameter editors regard type and constraints. In a single transaction all changes are saved, resulting in a new experiment program ready-to-use for the next experiment run. Even though changing the program's structure is not supported in this version, the eXpress program editor serves as a tool for quick program adaptations in the daily experiment routine. Furthermore this implementation will be used as a design and usage study for the later high-end W7-X program editor.

One discharge at the steady-state experiment Wendelstein 7-X will last up to 30 min and will be divided into many elementary experimental program phases, so-called segments. Physics programs need to be planned and technical parameters need to be adjusted well before the discharge. The technical parameters provide a complete description for the behavior of all participating components. Physicists, however, aim at specifying the state and behavior of both plasma and machine in terms of physics. Therefore, an abstraction layer above the technical parameters has been developed, the so-called high level parameters. These specify a subset of the technical parameters on a higher, more physics-oriented level and are therefore used to encapsulate technical details. During ordinary program planning, the physicists and engineers only see and work with these high level (physics) parameters. In comparison to shot-based and other existing experiments, this is an entirely new scientifically oriented method to plan experiments in terms of physics parameters (supported by tools) which are automatically mapped onto technical parameters. Besides the introduction of the high level parameter concept, this paper shows the planning of experiment programs with high level parameters for the example of the WEGA (a small stellarator experiment) magnetic field. For this case, details about defining and editing these parameters as well as about the mapping of high onto low level (technical) parameters will be given. Furthermore, the support of these processes by specialized tools is described. In addition, other fields of high level parameter applications will be mentioned.

To improve the plasma position and shape control system in ASDEX Upgrade, it is constantly expanded by the integration of data acquisition systems of important and interesting diagnostics. Usually the main responsibility of data acquisition systems is to collect data and subsequently put it into a data base archive system from where it is later analysed. The obligation now is also to simultaneously process the acquired data with an appropriate algorithm and send the pre-processed data in real-time to the plasma control system during a discharge. To achieve this requirements the used hardware must provide enough processing power and the operating system has to meet some real-time constraints. To avoid the burden of using proprietary real-time operating systems the trend is to use Open Source variants mainly based on Linux. Some of these solutions also allow us doing real-time capable communication using standard Ethernet hardware. By way of an example the implementation process of a prototype of a real-time data acquisition system based on a multi-core processor and Xenomai is demonstrated. Other possible solutions like Realtime Linux and their differences to Xenomai which we propose as the most sophisticated real-time framework for Linux are discussed in this paper.

Steady state experiments like Wendelstein 7-X have to deal with large amounts of data of different kind. Discharge lengths may last from less than a second up to 30 min. During this time diagnostics will measure data in different discharge phases with different rates depending on the physical program. Furthermore the technical configuration of all devices must be logged during the discharge as well as between experiment phases. This is necessary to allow supervision of constantly running devices. All measured data must be stored together in a common database to make it easily accessible and reduce the effort to combine data. Because of these requirements a continuous data acquisition system must be provided where data may exist at any time. Intelligent methods for browsing and retrieval of the acquired data from the common database are desired. This includes calendar-based time interval selection, overview plots for intervals that cover several days and online views of the last stored data. The contribution will explain the challenges and the advantages induced by this kind of data access methods. Existing and planned solutions for Wendelstein 7-X will be depicted. Particularly the “Data Browser” – a graphical tool specially designed to fulfil these tasks at W7-X – will be presented.

The stellarator W7X is a large complex experiment designed for continuous operation and planned to be operated for about 20 years. Software support is highly demanded for experiment preparation, operation and data analysis which in turn induces serious non-functional requirements on the software quality like, e.g.: • high availability, stability, maintainability vs. • high flexibility concerning change of functionality, technology, personnel • high versatility concerning the scale of system size and performance These challenges are best met by exploiting industrial experience in quality management and assurance (QM/QA), e.g. focusing on top-down development methods, developing an integral functional system model, using UML as a diagramming standard, building vertical prototypes, support for distributed development, etc., which have been used for W7X, however on an ‘as necessary’ basis. Proceeding in this manner gave significant results for control, data acquisition, corresponding database-structures and user applications over many years. As soon as production systems started using the software in the labs or on a prototype the development activity demanded to be organized in a more rigorous process mainly to provide stable operation conditions. Thus a process improvement activity was started for stepwise introduction of quality assuring processes with tool support taking standards like CMMI, ISO-15504 (SPICE) as a guideline. Experiences obtained so far will be reported. We conclude software engineering and quality assurance has to be an integral part of systems engineering right from the beginning of projects and be organized according to industrial standards to be prepared for the challenges of nuclear fusion research.

This contribution gives an overview of the project “Prototype W7-X control system”. The objective of this prototype project is to demonstrate the applicability of the segment orientated control system at a running fusion experiment including steady-state operation, interaction of all relevant components, real time control, data acquisition and on-line data analysis. Furthermore, the W7-X safety concept will be implemented at WEGA and tested.

Wendelstein 7-X is designed to be a steady state experiment. One discharge may last up to 30 min and will be divided into many segments (elementary experimental program parts). Physics programs need to be pre-planned and technical parameters need to be adjusted in the long run. The technical parameters are a complete set of parameters for all participating components, which describe their behavior within a segment. To enable the diagnosticians to focus on physical experiment parameters only, an abstraction layer above the technical parameters has been developed, the so-called high level parameters. The high level parameters specify a subset of the technical parameters on a physics level and are therefore used to hide technical details. During ordinary program planning, the diagnosticians only see and work with these physics parameters. Having finished editing, the high level parameters will be mapped by a user-defined transformation function onto technical parameters. For all technical parameters which are not defined by the high level parameters, the default values will be taken from one particular predefined pattern. Hence a complete segment is defined by a set of high level parameters including a pattern. In comparison to shot-based and other existing experiments, this is an entirely new, scientifically oriented approach to plan experiments. The motivation and concept of the high level parameters will be discussed. The successful implementation of this concept at the W7-X CoDaC prototype – the small stellarator experiment WEGA – will be presented.

The coupling of continuous data acquisition and continuous online analysis keeping up with the acquisition is one of the features the W7-X data acquisition system is designed for. As proof of principle of this concept the magnetic diagnostics have been implemented. The magnetic diagnostics measure time derivatives of the magnetic fluxes and the signals have to be time integrated accordingly. Both measurement and analysis tasks are executed on a single PC based system. The configuration of both hard- and software of the system is presented. Special focuses are the task of software integration of a user supplied online analysis function into the data acquisition system and the incorporation of the complete system into the W7-X segment concept in use by the control system. The complete installation has been tested at the WEGA Stellarator experiment. Because WEGA is capable of continuous steady state plasma operation the practical suitability of the installation for W7-X could be demonstrated successfully.

The increasing number of data acquisition stations and setups in laboratory environments at Wendelstein 7-X does already produce a considerable amount of data by now. Diagnosticians want to view the acquired data in a comfortable way and use them for calculations in their own test and analysis algorithms. To prepare for full operation of W7-X, a reasonable approach is to provide data access methods that stay as close as possible to the final data access concept. This requires taking care of the special needs of W7-X regarding continuously acquired data, segment based parameter switching and synchronization of data from different diagnostics. Therefore, a data access interface has been designed and implemented considering continuous data acquisition as well as usability and performance issues. The interface and its usage in different software environments (e.g. high level scientific programming languages) will be explained. Also, the integration of user defined off line analysis algorithms will be described. Additionally, the DataBrowser will be presented. The DataBrowser is a Java application that can browse continuously acquired data of different kind, provides several types of plots including zooming functions to display the data and the corresponding parameters and offers export functions to save selected data locally.

The concepts for the control of the fusion experiment WENDELSTEIN 7-X (W7-X) consider all requirements regarding safety, steady-state operation, flexibility, availability, performance and scalability. The early demonstration of the steady-state control concepts with all interacting parties is necessary to minimize development costs since integrated tests of components are scheduled for a later stage of the W7-X project planning. Therefore the implementation of an integrated test-bed for the control concepts of W7-X is very important to minimize project risks. Main objectives of the test-bed project are an integrated test of control, data acquisition, diagnostics operation and data processing in a W7-X-like environment (steady-state segmented operation, real-time control, interplay of the central slow control system with components control systems, on-line data analysis tools), a demonstration of the W7-X safety concept and the education of engineers and session leaders for a W7-X-like machine operation. The contribution describes the use of the small in-house stellarator experiment WEGA as test-bed for the W7-X control concepts.

The Wendelstein 7-X stellarator experiment by its nature has the need for continuous live data monitoring. New technical and security related requirements make a redesign of the monitoring architecture, originating in the first years of the century, necessary. Besides that, new developments in technologies, user interfaces and generally IT supported work flows, generate new expectations at the system user level, including live remote participation. To answer these upcoming demands, the CoDaC team at Wendelstein 7-X has designed a new architecture for monitoring data management, distribution and observation. As a very flexible user interface, a client web application was developed, utilizing modern technologies like WebSockets and WebGL for high performance live data visualization. A touch friendly interface design offers both broad support for new access tools (like tablets, smart phones, smart TV sets) and a very flexible and intuitive work flow. This paper describes the new MonA-LISA monitoring architecture and gives a short overview over the options provided by the web based monitoring client.