Evolution in the Development of the Italian Single-dish COntrol System (DISCOS)

DISCOS [*] is a control system developed by the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) and currently in use at three radio telescope facilities of Medicina, Noto and the Sardinia Radio Telescope (SRT) [**]. DISCOS development is based on the adoption of the ALMA Common Software (ACS) framework. During the last two years, besides assisting the astronomical commissioning of the newly-built SRT and enabling its early science program, the control system has undergone some major upgrades. The long-awaited transition to a recent ACS version was performed, migrating the whole code base to 64 bit operative system and compilers, addressing the obsolescence problem that was causing a major technical debt to the project. This opportunity allowed us to perform some refactoring, in order to implement improved logging and resource management. During this transition the code management platform was migrated to a git-based versioning system and the continuous integration platform was modified to accommodate these changes. Further upgrades included the system completion at Noto and the expansion to handle new digital backends.