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Jirden, L. S.

Paper Title Page
TOAB03 ALICE Control System – Ready for LHC Operation 65
 
  • A. Augustinus, M. Boccioli, P. Ch. Chochula, S. Kapusta, P. Rosinsky, C. Torcato de Matos, L. W. Wallet, L. S. Jirden
    CERN, Geneva
  • G. De Cataldo, M. Nitti
    INFN-Bari, Bari
 
  ALICE is one of the four LHC experiments presently being built at CERN and due to start operations by the end of 2007. The experiment is being built by a very large worldwide collaboration; about 1000 collaborators and 85 institutes are participating. The construction and operation of the experiment pose many technical and managerial problems, and this also applies to the design, implementation, and operation of the control system. The control system is technically challenging, representing a major increase in terms of size and complexity with respect to previous-generation systems, and the managerial issues are of prime importance due to the widely scattered contributions. This paper is intended to give an overview of the status of the control system. It will describe the overall structure and give some examples of chosen controls solutions, and it will highlight how technical and managerial challenges have been met. The paper will also describe how the various subsystems are integrated to form a coherent control system, and it will finally give some hints on the first experiences and an outlook of the forthcoming operation.  
TPPA22 Standard Device Control via PVSS Object Libraries in ALICE 135
 
  • A. Augustinus, P. Ch. Chochula, L. S. Jirden, L. W. Wallet
    CERN, Geneva
 
  The device control in the LHC experiments is based on OPC servers and PVSS SCADA systems. A software framework enables the user to set up his PVSS project for the different devices used. To achieve a homogeneous operational environment for the ALICE experiment, these devices need to be controlled thought standard interfaces. PVSS panels act as the upper control layer and should allow for full control of the devices. The PVSS object-oriented feature has allowed the development of device Object Libraries. The Object Libraries have two main advantages. On one hand, they ease the operator task thanks to the introduced standardization of the various device control panels. On the other hand, they reduce the developer’s job as only basic software knowledge is required to set up a control application for a standard device. This paper will describe the device control architecture including PVSS, software framework, and OPC server. It will describe the Object Libraries developed for some devices, and it will explain how the Object Libraries integrate tools in the ALICE controls environment, such as Finite State Machines, access control, and trending.

ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment)LHC (Large Hadron Collider)OPC (Ole for Process Control)SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition)

 
WPPB32 Cybersecurity in ALICE DCS 460
 
  • A. Augustinus, L. S. Jirden, P. Rosinsky, P. Ch. Chochula
    CERN, Geneva
 
  In the design of the control system for the ALICE experiment much emphasis has been put on cyber security. The control system operates on a dedicated network isolated from the campus network and remote access is only granted via a set of Windows Server 2003 machines configured as application gateways. The operator consoles are also separated from the control system by means of a cluster of terminal servers. Computer virtualization techniques are deployed to grant time-restricted access for sensitive tasks such as control system modifications. This paper will describe the global access control architecture and the policy and operational rules defined. The role-based authorization schema will also be described as well as the tools implemented to achieve this task. The authentication based on smartcard certificates will also be discussed.  
RPPA36 Handling Large Data Amounts in ALICE DCS 591
 
  • A. Augustinus, L. S. Jirden, S. Kapusta, P. Rosinsky, P. Ch. Chochula
    CERN, Geneva
 
  The amount of control data to be handled by the ALICE experiment at CERN is by a magnitude larger than in previous-generation experiments. Some 18 detectors, 130 subsystems, and 100,000 control channels need to be configured, controlled, and archived in normal operation. During the configuration phase several Gigabytes of data are written to devices, and during stable operations some 1,000 values per second are written to archival. The peak load for the archival is estimated to 150,000 changes/s. Data is also continuously exchanged with several external systems, and the system should be able to operate unattended and fully independent from any external resources. Much care has been taken in the design to fulfill the requirements, and this report will describe the solutions implemented. The data flow and the various components will be described as well as the data exchange mechanisms and the interfaces to the external systems. Some emphasis will also be given to data reduction and filtering mechanisms that have been implemented in order to keep the archive within maintainable margins.  
RPPB21 Finite State Machines for Integration and Control in ALICE 650
 
  • A. Augustinus, M. Boccioli, P. Ch. Chochula, L. S. Jirden, G. De Cataldo
    CERN, Geneva
 
  From the control point of view a physics experiment can be seen as a vast hierarchy of systems and subsystems with an experiment control node at the top and single atomic control channels at the bottom. In the case of the ALICE experiment at CERN the many systems and subsystems are being built by many engineers and physicists in different institutes around the world. The integration of the various parts to form a homogeneous system enabling coherent automatic control can therefore be seen as a major challenge. A distributed PVSS SCADA system complemented with a device and system modeling schema based on finite state machines has been used to achieve this. This paper will describe the schema and the tools and components that have been developed at CERN and it will show how this has been implemented and used in Alice. The efforts of standardizing the state diagrams for different types of devices and systems at different levels will be described and some detailed examples will be shown. The Alice graphics user interface integrating both the FSM control hierarchy and the PVSS monitoring will also be described.