Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Science BUDKER INSTITUTE OF NUCLEAR PHYSICS

The Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) requires expensive hardware and software to provide the high performance and high reliability required for accelerator control. No more than several years ago, personal computers based on Intel x86 microprocessors lacked computing power to compete with workstations, such as SPARCstation. However, with the advent of the high performance and low cost Pentium (x86 platform) in the recent years, high performance PCs become an attractive alternative to the expensive workstations. The recent trends to search for low cost effective solutions in the research laboratories provides us enough incentives to port EPICS to a PC platform. LANL group has used PCs successfully in the EPICS environment in which a PC running WindowsNT (or Windows95) is employed as a host computer to provide an Operator Interface (OPI). A PC or a MVME167 mounted in a VME crate is used as the target computer to operate as the Input Output Controller (IOC). At present time, standard EPICS IOC uses VxWorks as real time operating system. The most recent version of VxWorks is provided by Wind River Systems as a part of a rather expensive TORNADO integrated environment tool kit for software cross-development. Besides using PC hardware, further saving would come from replacing VxWorks with a less expensive real time OS, such as LynxOS. The overall cost of both IOC and OPI systems can be minimized by porting EPICS software to homogeneous environment of PC running LynxOS. This approach also simplifies the installation and development of EPICS based control systems. This will report the status of porting EPICS to the LynxOS/x86. ( C ) Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics SB RAS