The DANTE (DAPHNE New Tools Environment) control system has been fully designed and is now being integrated. Several innovative features have been inserted in the design: - the use of Macintosh Personal Computers throughout the whole system, including VME CPU's built on purpose using Apple CPU boards gives access to an enormous quantity of high level software, where new powerful tools become available day by day. LabVIEW by National Instruments has been chosen as development environment. - point to point high speed fiber optic links instead of a network for high bandwidth system update; - centralized architecture for simplicity and reliability; - centralized real time Database continuosly updated at runtime by the peripheral CPU's and polled by the consoles; - open architecture, with simple and efficient communications between internal processors and the rest of the world. Accelerator physics programs and applications can be written in any language and communicate with the LabVIEW environment through direct Process to Process communication.
C. et al. (1993) studied this question.