38th Tango Community meeting at SOLEIL

28 May 2024, 08:00 → 30 May 2024, 18:00 Europe/Paris

Amphitheatre main building (Synchrotron SOLEIL)

Gwenaëlle Abeillé (Synchrotron SOLEIL), Vincent Hardion (MAX IV Laboratory)

ON SITE REGISTRATIONS ARE CLOSED 

The 38th Tango Community meeting will be hosted as an hybrid meeting by Synchrotron SOLEIL on the 28-30 May 2024.

Joining in presence requires registration and payment of fees. The amount of the registration fees is 100€ VAT included. They include coffee breaks and the meeting dinner on the 29th of May. It does not include lunches.

The deadline for in person registrations is **the 05th of May 2024 with payment**

The remote attendance is free of charge but still requires a registration. In this case, you can still register up the first day. 

The Sardana Workshop satellite to the 38th Tango Community meeting will start right after, on 30th of May at 13:45 and will last one afternoon. The preliminary agenda is available here: https://gitlab.com/sardana-org/sardana-followup/-/blob/main/20240530-SOLEIL/AGENDA.md. The workshop is free of charge and the registration in based on sending an e-mail to Zbigniew Reszela from ALBA (zreszela@cells.es). You are all very welcome to join it!

The possible types of contributions are:

Tuesday, 28 May

08:30 → 09:00 Registration

09:00 → 09:20 Welcome & coffee

09:20 → 09:30 Introduction

09:30 → 12:30 Parallel workshops

09:30 Taranta workshop

The Taranta workshop will be a joined effort both from MAXIV and SKAO Organizations, the main points should be:

1. How to develop a small widget, target developer, focus on architecture
2. Full taranta demo, main funcionalities
3. New feature, Synoptic on Taranta

Speakers: Mr Helder Ribeiro (Atlar Innovation), Matteo Canzari (INAF), Vincent Hardion (MAX IV Laboratory), Yimeng Li

09:30 Taurus - Python GUI Framework for Tango

Taurus is a python framework for control and data acquisition CLIs and GUIs in scientific/industrial environments. Taurus interfaces smootly with the Tango Control Systems and is widelly used and developed by the Tango Community.

For non-programmers, Taurus allows the creation of fully-featured GUI (with forms, plots, synoptics, etc) from scratch in a few minutes. For programmers, Taurus gives full control to more advanced users to create and customize CLIs and GUIs programmatically using Python.

We will organize a Taurus Workshop on the workshop session of the 38th Tango Community meeting. The main part of this workshop will be a "Hands on tutorial" on Taurus usage and development. The hands on sessions will include:

• Taurus Zero-code solutions: forms, trends/plots, composing codeless
  apps, using Python expressions in GUIs w/o programming etc.
• Taurus Low-code solutions: Developing GUIs with Taurus/Qt designer.
• Taurus GUI programatic development: PyQt app development.
• Develop Taurus widgets: add Taurus capabilities to PyQt widgets.
• Taurus SVG Synoptic library: Active Synoptics with SVG and PyQt.

The workshop will be also available for the remote participants via Zoom:

https://rediris.zoom.us/j/93851652210?pwd=cEhLYXFEcnJ5QWhmbmFYMm9wdGVOZz09

Meeting ID: 938 5165 2210
Passcode: 746810

Speakers: Emilio Morales (ALBA Synchrotron.), Johan Forsberg (MAX IV Laboratory), Mr Jose Antonio Ramos Andrades (ALBA Synchrotron / CELLS), Miquel Navarro (ALBA Synchrotron), Zbigniew Reszela (ALBA)

12:30 → 14:00 Lunch break

14:00 → 15:30 Facility status update

14:00 SOLEIL II status report

Since 2008, SOLEIL is in operation providing users with access to a wide range of experimental techniques thanks to its 29 beamlines, covering a broad energy range from THz to hard X-ray. In response to new scientific and societal challenges, the construction phase of the SOLEIL II project is set to commence in 2025. This project aims to develop an ambitious Diffraction Limited Storage Ring (DLSR) that will enhance brilliance, coherence, and flux. Additionally, the upgrade will include the improvement of beamlines in a later phase. Throughout this upgrade, the TANGO control system will continue to serve as the main control system for managing the accelerator and beamlines. It will be seamlessly integrated into the ongoing digital transformation, which is aimed at addressing future scientific challenges.

As collaboration is always a valuable asset in projects as stimulating as SOLEIL II. We would be delighted to welcome you to join SOLEIL for the 38th TANGO collaboration meeting, where we actively encourage the development and exchange of ideas.

Speaker: Dr Amor Nadji (Synchrotron SOLEIL)

14:20 Elettra and FERMI status report

Short overview of current status and developmente at Elettra and FERMI.

Speaker: Lorenzo Pivetta (ELETTRA Sincrotrone Trieste)

14:40 SOLARIS status report

This talk covers a comprehensive status update on the current state of the controls group of the SOLARIS synchrotron. We detail recent advancements in system architecture, software developments, and integration of new enhancements of the control infrastructure. Finally, we outline challenges in terms of systems migration and how we want to solve them as well as plans for the future.

Speakers: Michal Piekarski (SOLARIS), Michał Fałowski (NSRC SOLARIS)

15:00 PALLAS control command a Tango case study for a laser-plasma accelerator test facility

Laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) is a promising approach for generating accelerating fields three orders of magnitude larger than what is currently achieved in standard RF cavities. Spectacular progress has been made during the last 15 years in understanding the physics involved in laser-plasma accelerators. The transition from demonstration experiments to accelerator beamline is observed in many high-intensity laser labs [1]. In this context at IJClab, the PALLAS (Prototyping Accelerator based on Laser-Plasma technology) project [2] aims to build a demonstrator of laser-plasma injector operating at 10Hz delivering an electron beam of 200 MeV, >30 pC, 1 mm.mrad emittance, an energy spread < 5%, and a bunch length in the femtosecond range with stability and reliability comparable to conventional RF electron accelerator. To this end, we focus on three particular areas of accelerator development: control of the laser driver, plasma target and complete characterisation of the electron bunch phase space. We will report on the progress in developing a complete control and acquisition system under Tango for the accelerator [3], incorporating a 50TW Amplitude laser driver. We will discuss the challenges of implementing the Tango control system.

[1] : 1. Feister, S. et al. Control Systems and Data Management for High-Power Laser Facilities. High Pow Laser Sci Eng 1–31 (2023) doi:10.1017/hpl.2023.49.
[2] : http://pallas.ijclab.in2p3.fr
[3] : http://gitlab.in2p3.fr/pallas/controlcommand/

Speaker: kevin Cassou (CNRS/IN2P3/IJClab)

15:20 Tango at LULI

LULI's Facilities status: Apollon, Hera, LULI2000. Overview, devices servers and archiving progress.

Speaker: Stéphane Marchand (CNRS/LULI)

15:30 → 16:00 Coffee break

16:00 → 17:30 Tango kernel status report: 1

16:00 cppTango status report

What has been done in cppTango over the last year? Join in this talk to find it out.

Speaker: Thomas Braun (byte physics e.K.)

16:20 PyTango Status Report

Latest news from the PyTango project.

Speaker: Yury Matveev (DESY)

16:40 Tango v10 and IDLv6

A release candidate for Tango V10 (cppTango and PyTango) is expected to be made available during this community meeting. It is a release with new features that we announced at the previous community meeting. To implement the new features we had to modify the Tango IDL interface for the first time in 10 years. We believe that the demo that is embedded in this talk will show that it has been worth it to introduce a new major Tango version number.

Speakers: Anton Joubert (MAX IV Laboratory), Thomas Juerges (SKAO)

Wednesday, 29 May

09:00 → 10:30 Tango ecosystem updates

09:00 HDB++ project status report

Update on HDB++ project.

Speakers: Damien Lacoste, Lorenzo Pivetta (ELETTRA Sincrotrone Trieste)

09:20 Taurus Status and Workshop Summary

[In Progress]

Taurus Workshop Summary
Taurus Project and Community Status Updates

Speaker: Zbigniew Reszela (ALBA Synchrotron)

09:40 Pogo roadmap update

After last year's presentation on the renewal of pogo, where are we ?
On the classic pogo stack, we moved to updated dependencies and java 17 and forward.
On the rewrite side let's show the (hopefully) future as more than a proof of concept but a working project that can already be used in production.

Speaker: Damien Lacoste

10:00 Sardana Status

[In Progress]

Sardana Project and Community Updates from last year.

Speaker: Zbigniew Reszela (ALBA Synchrotron)

10:15 Generic OCI images for C++ Tango Device Servers and Clients

We have developed generic OCI (formerly known as Docker) images to be used in gitlab CI/CD.

These are used/planned to be used in cppTango, TangoTest, TangoSourceDistribution, Starter, TangoDatabase, tango-admin.

Speaker: Thomas Braun (byte physics e.K.)

10:30 → 11:00 Coffee break

11:00 → 12:30 TANGO community devices and tools: 1

11:00 Pixi: Package management made easy

Pixi is a new package management tool built on top of the conda ecosystem.
Drawing inspiration from modern package managers like Cargo, Poetry or Yarn, it introduces innovative workflows to enhance the developer experience.
Pixi, with its cross-platform compatibility (Windows, Mac and Linux) and speed (written in Rust), simplifies dependency management, making it a very good candidate to support Tango users.

The goal of this presentation is to give a quick overview of pixi and show how it can help both seasoned developers and newcomers to get started with Tango related projects.

Speaker: Benjamin Bertrand (MAX IV Laboratory)

11:20 Using the MariaDB operator to deploy the tango database on kubernetes

At SKAO we are starting to use the MariaDB operator to deploy the tango databaseds service on kubernetes. This will be a short demo on this.

Speaker: Mauricio Zambrano (SKA Observatory)

11:30 Debugging devices in the cloud: Logs + Events

In the SKA software pipelines, artefacts from test execution contain logs (amongst others) from the pipeline which are very useful for debugging errors either from ongoing code changes or flaky tests. The success of finding the root cause for errors is typically a function of how good the logging is in the running device; however, more data points could also be beneficial. For this use case, there are four devices (at the moment) delivering a mid telescope element known as Dish LMC. The master device in Dish LMC needs to track and respond to events from the subservient devices to report the state of the dish. And having a "time machine" of events at any point enhances debugging greatly. In our integration environment, an archiver is deployed to store events from devices as they are exercised. Though helpful, it does not provide developers an immediate reference point to look when debugging issues on the staging environment. This talk demonstrates how to generate additional pipeline artefacts from device events to aid in debugging.

Speaker: Samuel Twum (SKAO)

11:50 Elastic Stack for Tango logs

This presentation will explore the integration of the Elastic Stack (comprising Filebeat, Logstash, Elasticsearch, and Kibana) for the purpose of managing Tango logs. It will cover the utilization of a Tango Frontend device with Filebeat to efficiently gather data, the techniques for parsing these logs with Logstash, and their indexing in an Elasticsearch cluster. The discussion will also touch on the advantages of using Kibana dashboards for effective data visualization and providing examples.

Speaker: Mr Anatole PAIN (Synchrotron SOLEIL)

12:10 OpcUaProxy Tango device

We will introduce the OpcUaProxy device and present the choices made to expose available features from an OpcUa server as Tango features. We'll discuss the difficulties we encountered, the limitations, and possible additional features.

Speaker: Mr Guillaume Pichon (Synchrotron SOLEIL)

12:30 → 14:00 Lunch break

14:00 → 15:30 Tango Web tools

14:00 The evolution and roadmap of the Taranta project

The Taranta project, a collaboration between the MaxIV Institute and SKAO within the Tango Collaboration, presents a web-based, no-code approach for creating graphical interfaces dedicated to monitoring and controlling Tango-based systems. Through an active development phase and close collaboration with the community, the software has seen the introduction of advanced features and a code refactor to enhance functionality, user experience, performance, and testability.
Currently, the software has matured to a level enabling adoption in both the daily operations of MaxIV synchrotron beamlines and the developmental phases of the SKA project. To facilitate users in increasingly comprehensive utilization, new features have been implemented, such as the ability to access devices from different Tango databases within a single dashboard. Architectural improvements have also been made to seamlessly integrate applications like Synoptic into Taranta, allowing for the integration of third-party data sources. Additional developments and improvements have been introduced in response to user needs.
Beyond these aspects, the presentation will delve into one of the most significant challenges faced—meeting the demands from institutes with diverse scientific purposes and project stages. This encompasses considerations of architecture, component numbers, and operator skill sets. The presentation will then delve into lessons learned, emphasizing the importance of adaptability and continuous improvement in a dynamic collaborative environment. The strategy for defining the roadmap will be discussed, with a focus on producing increasingly comprehensive GUIs tailored to the specific requirements of the users.

Speakers: Mr Helder Ribeiro (Atlar Innovation / SKAO), Matteo Canzari (INAF), Vincent Hardion (MAX IV Laboratory), Yimeng Li

14:20 SOLARIS State Grid Update

This talk discusses recent updates in State Grid's web application, outlines future development plans, and explores uniform themes and styles utilized in SOLARIS web applications.

Speakers: Joanna Wajda (National Synchrotron Radiation Centre SOLARIS), Michał Fałowski (NSRC SOLARIS)

14:40 TANGO Controls: Exploring visual programming to Kubernetes deployments

This paper explores the feasibility of a web-based interface designed to streamline the creation and deployment of TANGO Controls device servers on Kubernetes clusters through visual programming. The proposed interface aims to minimize the need for extensive boilerplate coding, offering an intuitive method for constructing device functionalities using drag-and-drop code blocks. This exploratory study assesses the interface's ability to facilitate the rapid development and deployment of devices or entire projects. Additionally, the system accommodates the integration of custom code to extend the basic generated functionalities, providing flexibility in device behavior. By abstracting the complexities of Kubernetes and TANGO Controls, this platform proposes a potential reduction in development time and complexity, making sophisticated control systems more accessible to developers with varying levels of expertise. The ultimate goal is to evaluate the practicality and efficiency of this approach in a real-world setting, identifying areas for further refinement and potential integration into existing control system frameworks.

Speaker: Pedro Silva (Atlar Innovation)

15:00 Web architecture upon SOLEIL archiving system

In order to monitor the control systems, we are currently deploying a new web architecture upon our existing Tango archiving system. Its main components are:
* A GraphQL back-end to retrieve data from archiving database
* A Grafana frond-end to create dashboards
* An in-house development of a machine status web application
We will present those components, followed by a demo of Grafana and our new machine status web application.

Speakers: Raphaël GIRARDOT (SOLEIL), Mr Thomas Marion (Synchrotron SOLEIL)

15:30 → 16:00 Coffee break

16:00 → 17:30 SOLEIL visit

30 minutes of introduction followed by a visit on the installations

18:30 → 21:30 Dinner at restaurant

Thursday, 30 May

09:00 → 10:30 TANGO community devices and tools: 2

09:00 TSAMI: A Tango State Machine Interpreter

Explore ALBA's software solution designed to simplify state machine creation for Tango Controls integration. Utilizing a compact DSL, our tool executes state machine workflows that can be visualized via a web interface. This presentation highlights practical uses, such as programming vacuum processes for self-correction and safe-state redirection. Built with PyTango, FastAPI, and pure HTML with HTMX, our software offers a straightforward approach to control system development.

Speaker: Albert Ollé (ALBA Synchrotron)

09:20 Hall Probe Bench Control GUI for ALBA

New control system for magnetic measurements with hall probe 3D moving bench was developed by developer from S2Innovation.

The agenda include:
- motivation for the new control system
- hardware being controled
- GUI

Speaker: Mateusz Celary (S2Innovation)

09:40 Tools for testing your beamline

As the MAX IV facility is maturing, expectations on beamlines are also rising, not least in terms of reliability. The controls team decided to build "checkup"; a simple, general toolset for implementing a test suite for a beamline, using pytest and pytango. Some use cases: "pre-flight" checks before a beamtime starts; when switching between experiments; after commissioning or starting up from shutdown. I'll present some background, the tool itself, and some initial results.

Speaker: Johan Forsberg (MAX IV Laboratory)

10:00 Tangoctl: a utility to query and test Tango devices

Tangoctl reads information fields, attributes, command and property configuration and values of all Tango devices with a single command. The ouput format is configurable and it can be called from bash or Python. It can be configured with a JSON file. Regular expression filtering of Tango entities is supported. Support for Tango devices running in a Kubernetes cluster is built in.

Speaker: Johan Coetzer (SARAO, SKAO)

10:20 Boogie, another Jive for the terminal

Boogie is a personal project aiming to be a Jive alternative running in the terminal. It's written in python using PyTango and Textual.

Speaker: Johan Forsberg (MAX IV Laboratory)

10:30 → 11:00 Coffee break

11:00 → 12:30 Tango kernel status report: 2

11:00 Summary of the Tango Cybersecurity SIG

Summary of the Tango Cybersecurity SIG

Speaker: Vincent Hardion (MAX IV Laboratory)

11:20 Tango V11 panel discussion

Speaker: Vincent Hardion (MAXIV Laboratory)

12:20 Closing session

12:30 → 12:40 End of Tango meeting

14:00 → 17:00 Sardana meeting

Convener: Zbigniew Reszela (ALBA Synchrotron)