Developing heterogeneous multicore platforms requires choosing the best hardware configuration for mapping the application, and modifying that application so that different parts execute on the most appropriate hardware component. The hArtes toolchain provides the option of automatic or semi-automatic support for this mapping. During test and validation on several computation-intensive applications, hArtes achieved substantial speedups and drastically reduced development times.

Modern particle accelerator facilities require sophisticated control systems capable of managing thousands of process variables in real-time while ensuring high availability, scalability, and ease of maintenance. This paper presents EPIK8S (EPICS on Kubernetes), a framework that leverages Kubernetes container orchestration to deploy, manage, and scale EPICS (Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System) infrastructure for accelerator control systems. A central design principle is that the entire control system configuration for a beamline — comprising IOCs, services, and infrastructure — is captured in a single YAML file, which is processed through a Jinja2 templating layer to produce device-specific IBEK runtime configurations. This three-tier architecture radically simplifies IOC management, enables complete change tracking via Git, and eliminates an entire class of manual configuration errors. The framework introduces a GitOps-based approach using ArgoCD for continuous deployment, providing declarative configuration management and automated synchronisation. We describe the architecture and implementation, and report operational experience from three INFN facilities: the SPARC_LAB photoinjector, the DAFNE Beam Test Facility (BTF), and the ELI-NP gamma beam system in Romania. Performance metrics — including dedicated Channel Access round-trip latency measurements comparing bare-metal, pod-to-pod, and external-to-cluster scenarios — and lessons learned from over two years of production operation demonstrate significant improvements in deployment efficiency, maintainability, and reliability compared to traditional bare-metal EPICS deployments, with containerisation overhead well within acceptable bounds for accelerator control applications.

One of the main technological challenges in plasma wakefield acceleration (PWFA) research and development is achieving stable and reproducible acceleration. In particular, for PWFA schemes based on particle-driven plasma wave excitation, beam stability and timing jitter are increasingly critical. In these configurations, magnetic or radio-frequency (RF) compression schemes are often used, and the beam time-of-arrival jitter at the end of the linear accelerator can be strongly correlated with the phase noise of RF accelerating structures operated off-crest. For this reason, since 2008, an RF phase fast-feedback system acting within each RF pulse has been successfully implemented at Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati, Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (LNF-INFN) at the Sources for Plasma Accelerators and Radiation Compton with Laser And Beam (SPARC_LAB) facility, operating on both S-band ($2.856$ GHz) and C-band ($5.712$ GHz) klystrons. This paper presents the upgrade and optimization of the fast-feedback system for an S-band klystron powered by a pulse-forming network modulator. This technology introduces significantly higher intrinsic phase noise than, for instance, solid state-based modulators. It is therefore essential to minimize such phase fluctuations to keep the machine stability under control. Both the feedback hardware (electronic boards and RF circuitry) and the software (controller and user interface) have been upgraded. Tests performed at SPARC_LAB achieved a reduction in klystron-induced jitter of a factor of 30, reaching values below 15 fs rms on both power plants. Moreover, adding a remote control of the feedback loop enabled a straightforward optimization of the operating point, allowing the phase stability performance to be pushed close to its practical limits. A detailed analysis of RF phase noise measurements with the fast-feedback loop in operation is also presented.