Speaker
Description
The ITER Neutral Beam Test Facility (NBTF) supports the development and validation of the neutral beam injection systems required for ITER. Its two major experiments, SPIDER and MITICA, operate complex infrastructures that demand reliable coordination across many distributed subsystems. Recent SPIDER campaigns, following the 2024 restart with caesium‑assisted operation, demonstrated improvements in beam uniformity and current density with upgraded RF generators and enhanced pumping. In parallel, MITICA advanced toward integrated megavolt‑level operation. These activities highlight the need for a robust dispatching framework capable of managing tightly coupled tasks under real‑time constraints.
To address the limitations of the earlier centralized dispatcher, a new MDSplus Redis‑based architecture has been developed. The system introduces a distributed model composed of a central Action Dispatcher and multiple Action Servers organized by function. Redis, used as both message broker and shared state repository, provides low‑latency task queues, publish/subscribe communication, and persistent state recovery. This design improves scalability, modularity, and fault tolerance, while enabling parallel execution of independent actions and rapid system‑wide synchronization.
A Python‑native Web Monitor complements the dispatcher by offering real‑time views of server activity, action progression, logging streams, and heartbeat diagnostics. Implemented with Flask and Gunicorn, it ensures alignment with the Redis‑based backend and reduces integration complexity compared to earlier multi‑language solutions. The new system has been validated in full discharge cycles in both SPIDER and MITICA and is now being adopted by external laboratories, demonstrating its suitability for large‑scale, distributed fusion experiments.
| Minioral | Yes |
|---|---|
| IEEE Member | No |
| Are you a student? | No |