BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York, USA
The repository of data for the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and associated pre-injector accelerators consists of well over half a petabyte of uncompressed data. By todays standard, this is not a large amount of data. However, a large fraction of that data has never been analyzed and likely contains useful information. We will describe in this paper our efforts to use machine learning techniques to pull out new information from existing data. Our focus has been to look at simple problems, such as associating basic statistics on certain data sets and doing predictive analysis on single array data. The tools we have tested include unsupervised learning using Tensorflow, multimode neural networks, hierarchical temporal memory techniques using NuPic, as well as deep learning techniques using Theano and Keras.
BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York, USA
Accessing database resources from Accelerator Controls servers or applications with JDBC/ODBC and other dedicated programming interfaces have been common for many years. However, availability and performance limitations of these technologies were obvious as rich web and mobile communication technologies became more mainstream. HTTP REST services have become a more reliable and common way for easy accessibility for most types of data resources, include databases. Several commercial database REST services have become available in recent years, each with their own pros and cons. This paper presents a way for setting up a generic HTTP REST database service with technology that combines the advantages of application servers (such as Glassfish), JDBC drivers, and Java technology to make major RDBMS systems easy to access and handle data in a secure way. This allows database clients to retrieve data (user data or meta data) in standard formats such as XML or JSON.
BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York, USA
In keeping with a long tradition in the BNL Collider-Accelerator Department (C-AD) controls environment, we try to provide general and simple to use interfaces to the users of the controls. In the past we have built command line tools, Java tools, and C++ tools that allow users to easily access live and historical controls data. With more demand for access through other interfaces, we recently built a set of python and MATLAB modules to simplify access to control system data. This is possible, and made relatively easy, with the development of HTTP service interfaces to the controls*. While this paper focuses on the python and MATLAB tools built on top of the HTTP services, this work demonstrates clearly how the HTTP service paradigm frees the developer from having to work from any particular operating system or develop using any particular development tool.
* T. D'Ottavio, et al., these proceedings
BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York, USA
This paper describes a new web page creation system that allows web developers with limited programming experience to create interactive displays of control system data. Web pages can be created that display live control system data that updates in real-time, as well as data stored within our logging/archiving and database systems. Graphical, tabular, and textual displays are supported as well as standard interaction techniques via buttons, menus and tabs. The developer creates a web page using a custom web page builder. The builder presents a web page as a user-defined grid of tiled cells. The developer chooses the display style of each cell from a list of available cell types, then customizes its data content. Final polish can be applied using HTML and CSS. Specialized tools are available for creating mobile displays. This paper shows examples of the web pages created, and provides a summary of the experience of both the web developers and users.
BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York, USA
This paper describes the development and use of an HTTP services architecture for building controls applications within the BNL Collider-Accelerator department. Instead of binding application services (access to live, database, and archived data, etc.) into monolithic applications using libraries written in C++ or Java, this new method moves those services onto networked processes that communicate with the core applications using the HTTP protocol and a RESTful interface. This allows applications to be built for a variety of different environments, including web browsers and mobile devices, without the need to rewrite existing library code that has been built and tested over many years. Making these HTTP services available via a reverse proxy server (NGINX) adds additional flexibility and security. This paper presents implementation details, pros and cons to this approach, and expected future directions.