Description
The CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is known to be one of the most complex scientific machines ever built by mankind. Its correct functioning relies on the integration of a multitude of interdependent industrial control systems, which provide different and essential services to run and protect the accelerators. Each of these control system produces a huge amount of data, that holds an important potential value to optimize the entire system in terms of its operational efficiency and reliability. The extremely large control data sets, often termed as “Big Data”, cannot be processed through the use of traditional database tools. This is why it is necessary to design and develop new analytical frameworks, data models and data-mining algorithms scalable enough to cope with the huge volume of data and at the same time capable of fulfilling the time constraints. Moreover due to the critical nature of industrial systems the analysis should be carried out without affecting the industrial processes and the system availability: no downtimes can be tolerated because of their inherent expensive consequences. CERN also represents a unique and critical environment to evaluate the developed analytical solutions due to the size and heterogeneity of its industrial control systems. The main goal of the openlab collaboration between Siemens and CERN is to design and implement a Big Data platform which makes use of innovative analytical techniques and software packages flexible enough to match the challenging data analytics requirements of the various industrial control systems.
Speaker
Filippo Maria Tilaro
(CERN)
