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Mercado, J. M.

Paper Title Page
TPPB09 The ALICE Transition Radiation Detector Control System 181
 
  • J. M. Mercado
    Heidelberg University, Physics Institute, Heidelberg
 
  The ALICE experiment at the LHC incorporates a transition radiation detector (TRD) designed to provide electron identification in the central barrel at momenta in excess of 2 GeV/c as well as fast (6 us) triggering capability for high transverse momentum (pt > 3 GeV/c) processes. It consists of 540 gas detectors and about 1.2 million electronics readout channels that are digitized during the 2 us drift time by the front-end electronics (FEEs) designed in full custom for on-detector operation. The TRD detector control system (DCS) back end is fully implemented as a detector-oriented hierarchy of objects behaving as finite state machines (FSMs). PVSS II is used as the SCADA system. The front-end part is composed of a 3-layer software architecture with a distributed information management (DIM) server running on an embedded Linux on-detector system pool (about 550 servers) and the so-called InterComLayer interfacing the DIM client in PVSS as well as the configuration database. The DCS also monitors and controls several hundreds of low- and high-voltage channels, among many other parameters. The layout of the system and status on installation and commissioning are presented.