Real-time Control System Prototype for Mechanical and Optical Systems based on Parallel Computing Techniques

Real-time control systems often require dedicated hardware and software, including real-time operating systems, while many systems are available for off-line computing, mainly based on standard system units (PCs), standard network connections (Ethernet), standard operating systems (Linux) and software independent from the particular architecture of the single unit. In order to try to get the advantages of both the technologies, we built an hybrid control system prototype using network based parallel computing architecture within real-time control system. In this paper we describe the architecture of the implemented system, the preliminary tests we performed for its characterization and the architecture of the control system we used for the real-time control tests.