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Welcome to the Home of GDAC

GDAC was developed at CERN where its original name was SLiC. The GDAC (Generic Device Access and Control) framework is an extensible multithreaded cross platform (Linux (x86,VME)/Windows) C++ device control environment. It typically will be used as the basis for custom OPC servers or front-end control software.

It was developed to be used as the basis of software to control hardware devices for which there is no control solution commercially available. In general vendors of hardware devices normally provide OPC servers to make their devices accessible via the network. But as OPC is based on Microsoft's OLE technology this solution does not work on Linux VME crates which are quite commonly used in high energy physics experiments. Besides that the detector teams in a physics experiment often build their hardware themselves and they need to provide the control software (even if it is an OPC server) for these devices, too.

Therefore to avoid the necessity to rewrite large portions of code everytime such a custom control software has to be written the common parts like the configuration engine, the logging, the multithreaded device interface access and a common architecture to implement new devices were factored out and put into this framework. An extender of the framework only needs to plug in the device specific code.

One further asset of GDAC is that it is network protocol independent. At the moment we implemented network modules for the OPC and the DIM network protocols, but other protocols like CORBA or SOAP could be implemented easily.