Performance Comparison of EPICS IOC and MARTe in a Hard Real-Time Control Application

EPICS is used worldwide mostly for controlling accelerators and large experimental physics facilities. Although EPICS is well fit for the design and development of automation systems, which are typically VME or PLC-based systems, and for soft real-time systems, it may present several drawbacks when used to develop Hard Real-Time systems/applications especially when General Purpose Operating Systems as plain Linux are chosen. This in particular true in fusion research devices typically employing several Hard Real-Time systems, such as the magnetic control systems, that may requires strict determinism, and high performance in terms of jitter and latency, otherwise serious deterioration of important plasma parameters can happen, possibly leading to an abrupt termination of the plasma discharge.