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I am a student of Instrumentation and Control. Considering the versatility and stability of Linux, I was wondering if Linux can be configured to act as a Distributed Control System?

Also if yes, which distro would be appropriate? I have basic knowledge of Linux shell scripting so I would prefer the distro to be relatively user-friendly.

Note : Having experience with Ubuntu, I'd like to set-up the server there.

Updates in reply to answers :

My hardware : i5 2nd gen, 8GB ram, 500GB HDD.
System : Ubuntu 12.04 Desktop edition 64bit.
Required job (proposed) : Running 5 or more sensors(as a start), driven by a micro-controller(s).

I need to set up a server, but without re-installing or changing the system. A second user as a workstation if it can be set-up so.

Virtualization is welcome but don't know how.

I have till March '13 to learn OpenCL and parallel programming to use my graphics card (NVidia GeForce 525M 1GB) (although this part of plan is still under heavy consideration).

It would be useful and appriciated to get links to good books, tutorials and reports of similar undertaking.

VedVals
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2 Answers2

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Of course it can. Depending on your specific needs, you should consider several things:

  • will you need any kind of support or will you be able and allowed (in the long run) to take care of the technical things yourself? For anything production grade an "enterprise" distribution with support seems to be a better option.
  • what architecture do you need to run on? - x86, PowerPC, MIPS, SPARC, ARM, AVR...?
  • will you need anything at least remotely real-time? In that case look for a real-time kernel.
  • will you need some sort of virtualization?

EDIT: If you just need to run a supervisory station, then distribution doesn't probably matter that much. You might want to run it separately from other processes though, see e.g. controlling priority of applications using cgroups for some hints; the workstation stuff can be placed for example in a separate LXC.

To directly control the peripherals (which to me doesn't sound like a DCS at all) you may need to run it on a real-time kernel to have guaranteed responsiveness for the controlling process(es).

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peterph
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Linux machines are used as DCSes, but it is impossible to give more specific answers without knowing the exact requirements. Both server- and embedded-oriented distributions might be appropriate.

CL.
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