Commissioning and First Operation of the SPIDER Control and Data Acquisition System

The Control and Data Acquisition System (CODAS) of SPIDER, the first experiment of the Neutral Beam Test Facility, is under installation and undergoing the commissioning and first operation phases. The system hardware is nearly compliant with the ITER CODAC catalog for slow and fast plant systems. The system software is based on a combination of software frameworks that altogether collaborate to provide the required system functions. Slow control is implemented through the ITER CODAC Core System that encompasses EPICS, Control System Studio and ITER specific tools such as the Self-Data Description and Maven. Data management relies on MDSplus for data acquisition, storage, access, and processing. Fast control is far beyond the time requirements that can be met by EPICS and, thus, is implemented through MARTe. The paper will provide an overview of the control functions realized in SPIDER CODAS along with a technical discussion on their implementation. The paper will then describe the problems encountered during the system commissioning and the proposed solutions. Finally the results of the commissioning and of the first operation will be reported.