FESA, developed at CERN, is a framework to design, develop, deploy and test equipment software, called a FESA class. This realtime software runs on front-end computers and has access to the hardware of e.g. beam instrumentation devices and their electronics. It represents the data acquisition part and delivers data to the control system and accepts user inputs via property interfaces.

As FAIR is very close to the CERN accelerator infrastructure, such as multiplexed operation (at GSI Virtual Accelerators), heavy ion beams, large scale facility etc. and the manpower to create a new “state of the art” control system is not available, the FESA framework is going to be adapted at GSI.

For this, a collaboration between CERN and GSI (controls and beam diagnostics departments) is going to be started in July 2008 with the intention to create a FESA competence center at GSI, to increase the FESA developer community, and to benefit from developments on both sides.