Overview and Status of the SwissFEL Project at PSI

Recently, the installation of the components for the free electron laser SwissFEL has started at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI). In March 2016, beginning of the injector commissioning is planned and first lasing is foreseen a year later. New hardware, like VME64x-boards (IFC 1210, an P2020 based intelligent FPGA controller from IOxOS) and -crates (Trenew), timing system (from MRF with advanced features), motion controllers (Power PMAC from Delta Tau, and MDrive from Schneider), among others, as well as modern field buses, pose great challenges to the controls team. The close interaction of machine- and experiment-components require advanced software concepts for data-acquisition, -distribution, and -archiving. An overview of the project will be presented and the different HW and SW solutions based on the experience gained from preliminary implementations at other facilities of PSI will be explained. First results of the HW commissioning at the SwissFEL will be reported.
Proceedings of the 15th Int. Conf. on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems, ICALEPCS2015, Melbourne, Australia