Welcome to the NuMI ACNET Monitor Home

Brief introduction:

To monitor NuMI beam devices from outside the FNAL Accelerator Division network, we use the XML-RPC service provided by Charlie King. The service provides realtime data from any requested ACNET (Accelerator Control NETwork) devices using the XML-RPC protocol to issue remote procedure calls over the net. I have written a simple application based on the Java Analysis Studio (JAS) package to communicate with the XML-RPC ACNET server and make various plots of the device data. A call is sent to the service requesting that a list of ACNET devices be readout a given delay time (specified in millisecs) after a particlular accelerator cycle. Typical cycle names are the A5 event which is the beginning of the NuMI cycle and/or the A9 which occurs 200 microsecs before the NuMI kicker fires. A list of ACNET device names that are of interest to NuMI/MINOS monitoring and brief descriptions can be found here . In general, this monitor will recoginze any ACNET device and produce some simple generic plots. Presently, detailed plots have been developed only for NuMI devices.

In addition to the ACNET-XMLRPC realtime monitor, I have included instructions on installing and using the FNAL Data loggers JAS plugin. This plugin was developed by Timofei Bolshakov in the AD division to access ACNET data from the AD archives over http.

1) You need to have Suns Java development platform version 1.4 or higher installed. Download the latest version for your platform from Sun's Developer Network website.

2) Install the Java Analysis Studio 3 software package for your platform from here .

3) Copy the following Java archive files to the "extensions" subdirectory where the JAS3 program files were installed

a) xmlrpc-1.2-b1.jar . This is the Apache XML-RPC Java implementation. The original files were obtained from the Apache website.
b) acnet.jar . The ACNET-xmlrpc NuMI monitoring classes
c) DLPlugin.jar .The FNAL Data Logger plugin from Timofei Bolshakov(optional)

3) You will need a device.dat file to specify the list of devices you need to monitor and three text files where the calibration constants for the profile, muon and hadron monitors are specified pedConstants.txt, calConstants.txt, and swicConstants.txt. On Windows machines put this file in the same directory where the JAS3 binary is located. On Linux it should be in your current working directory.

4) Startup JAS3 from the directory where the .dat and .txt files are. On Windows DO NOT USE the icon, use a command prompt and cd to the directory where the binary is. The NuMI monitor should load automatically and a small dialog box that looks like this will appear in addition to the main JAS3 plotter window shown here.

Using the ACNET-XMLRPC Monitor

1) The XML-RPC ACNET monitor dialog box contains fields where the URLs for the XML-RPC service and the IP address of the computer to send the data back to are specified. Typically you will not need to change these, unless you are using ssh tunneling to get around a firewall. To use ssh tunneling check out the instructions at the end of Brett's BeamData webpage. If you are using ssh tunneling following Bretts example, then the "Server URL" field should be set to "http://localhost:8888/minos" and the "Call back URL" would be "http://minos-om.fnal.gov". You also need to specify a local port number on your computer where the program will listen for data. I use 19871 by default which is usually free.

2) Type in the clock cycle name and delay you need and edit the device.dat file to specify the devices you want readout. The format is: [device_name] [lower_limit] [upper_limit]. Use the defaults if you are not sure. Then click on "Start Job".

3) On the dialog box a status button appears for every device listed in device.dat. The button color is green if the device has been read back successfully and if the value is within the range specified (for scaler devices only). This is what the dialog box should look like after all devices have been read at least once and everything is OK.

4) On the main JAS plotter left frame a "tree" will appear which holds different subfolders each of which corresponds to the device being monitored. Each device folder contains links to the histograms from each job. Histogram and folder labels contain the ACNET device name they are associated with.

5) Here is an example snap shot of what the JAS3 main plotter page looks like with the default settings.

6) Not all histograms are displayed by default, a lot of the expert histograms are not. You can start a new plot page by clicking on "File"+"New"+"Plot Page" (see here). If you right click on the new plot page it will allow you to divide it into separate regions (like in this window snap shot). Double click on any histogram under Tree submenus and it will appear in the selected region.

Using the FNAL Data Logger Plugin

The FNAL data logger JAS3 plugin allows access to the ACNET data already logged in the accelerator division archives. The plugin is described here.

1) To start the data logger click on "File"+"Open Data Source". A new window will pop up as shown here. Select "FNAL Data Loggers" then click "Next".

2) Another dialog box will pop up. Specify the ACNET device name whose data you would like to see in the "Name" column. You can specify up to 8 devices.

3) Click on the pull down menu under the "Node" column. This is the list of archives which log data from the device you specified. Pick an archive.

4) Now specify the start time and end time in the fields labeled T1 and T2. Click on "Finish". In the example snapshots, we requested the data logged by G:OUTTMP, the FNAL outside temp. A new JAS3 plotter page should appear with a plot of the logged data as shown here.