Background: The Hefei Light Source (HLS) is a VUV and soft X-ray synchrotron radiation source. An upgrade project was started at the end of 2009 to improve the performance of the light source. The cooling water monitor system is a part of this upgrade project. Purpose: This system is developed under EPICS environment to monitor 596 distributed signals of the cooling water system

including the water temperature

pressure and flow

magnet temperature

and environment temperature in the tunnel. Methods: The cRIO-9073 controller from National Instruments (NI) is used as the hardware platform. The software development is implemented using LabVIEW with the EPICS interface “EPICS Server IO Server” from NI. A file with the hardware information

such as chassis serial number

model serial number

etc.

is used by the software to configure the installed hardware. A self-check program is developed to check whether the software matches with the hardware via the configuration file. System mirror-image method is used for the software installation to effectively speed up the installation process. Results: The test results in the commissioning indicate that this system is reliable

flexible

and easy to operate. Conclusion: NI cRIO with LabVIEW can be used to effectively monitor a large number of distributed signals

and can be easily integrated into EPICS based control systems.Cited