Speaker
Miguel Correia
(Instituto de Plasmas e Fusão Nuclear)
Description
High availability (HA) is a key element in the specification of next generation Fusion devices, targeting steady-state operation. HA is especially required on mission-critical systems, as is the case of experimental Fusion devices and future Fusion power plants, where safety of people, environment and the infrastructure/investment is a primordial priority.
IPFN developed control and data acquisition instrumentation under the PICMG 3.0 Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA) specification, composed of digitizing and hub blades, which establish a PCIe data network through ATCA’s backplane Fabric Interface, connecting to an external host computer.
The ATCA standard was selected to achieve a high level of availability, benefiting from its several redundancy resources, mandatory hardware management platform and native “Hot Swap” mechanism, which allows blade insertion and extraction without having to power off the system.
From the host/software perspective, ATCA digitizers and hubs correspond to PCIe endpoint and bridge devices. The PCIe standard specifies a “hot plug” procedure for add and removal of these devices. Although PICMG has created an extension for the implementation of PCIe on the ATCA Fabric Interface, it does not specify hot swap implications on the PCIe hierarchy. On the other hand, PCIe hot plug states that for form-factors other than PCIe itself, the hot plug mechanism is implementation-dependent and should be defined by the form-factor.
This paper describes the mechanisms, developed for an ATCA instrumentation platform, which will successfully coordinate hot swap mechanisms with the PCIe hot plug, in order to provide the overall system with HA. The present work also attempts to establish a relationship between these specifications, which could help to standardize PCIe hot plug implementation on the ATCA form-factor, fostering the development of instrumentation with such availability requirements.
Co-authors
Alvaro Combo
(Instituto de Plasmas e Fusão Nuclear, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal)
Antonio P. Rodrigues
(Instituto de Plasmas e Fusão Nuclear, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal)
Bernardo B. Carvalho
(Instituto de Plasmas e Fusão Nuclear, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal)
Bruno S. Goncalves
(Instituto de Plasmas e Fusão Nuclear, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal)
Bruno Santos
(Instituto de Plasmas e Fusão Nuclear, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal)
Carlos M. B. A. Correia
(LibPhysUC, Departamento de Física, Universidade de Coimbra, 3004-516 Coimbra, Portugal)
Jorge Sousa
(Instituto de Plasmas e Fusão Nuclear, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal)
Miguel Correia
(Instituto de Plasmas e Fusão Nuclear, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal)
Paulo F. Carvalho
(Instituto de Plasmas e Fusão Nuclear, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal)
