Speaker
Kerstin Lantzsch
(Bergische Universitaet Wuppertal (DE))
Description
The ATLAS experiment is one of the multi-purpose experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), constructed to study elementary particle interactions in collisions of high-energy proton beams. Twelve different sub-detectors as well as the common experimental infrastructure are supervised by the Detector Control System (DCS). The DCS enables equipment supervision of all ATLAS sub-detectors by using a system of 140 server machines running the industrial SCADA product PVSS. This highly distributed system reads, processes and archives of the order of 10^6 operational parameters. Higher level control system layers based on the CERN JCOP framework allow for automatic control procedures, efficient error recognition and handling, manage the communication with external control systems such as the LHC controls, and provide a synchronization mechanism with the ATLAS physics data acquisition system. A condition database is used to store the online parameters of the experiment and a subset of the parameters is replicated to an offline database for off-site access and as part of the physics data reconstruction. A configuration database is used to ease the mass parameterization of the detector. This contribution first describes the computing architecture which has been build and the software tools which are used to handle this complex and highly interconnected control system. Secondly, the experience gained during the first operation period of the LHC is given. And finally, the ongoing studies for future upgrades and the usage of new technology standards are presented.
Author
Sebastien Franz
(CERN)
Co-author
Kerstin Lantzsch
(Bergische Universitaet Wuppertal (DE))
