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Varela, F.

Paper Title Page
RPPA04 Automating the Configuration of the Control Systems of the LHC Experiments 529
 
  • P. Golonka, F. Varela, F. Calheiros
    CERN, Geneva
 
  The supervisory layer of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments is based on the PVSS SCADA tool and the Joint Control Project (JCOP) framework. This controls framework includes a Finite State Machine (FSM) toolkit, which allows operation of the control systems according to a well-defined set of states and commands. During the FSM transitions of the detectors, it will be required to reconfigure parts of the control systems. All configuration parameters of the devices integrated into the control system are stored in the so-called configuration database. In this paper the JCOP FSM-Configuration database tool is presented. This tool represents a common solution for the four LHC experiments to ensure the availability of all configuration data required for a given type of run of the experiment, in the PVSS sub-detector control applications. The implementation strategy chosen is discussed in the paper. This approach enables the standalone operation of different partitions of the detectors simultaneously while ensuring independent data handling. Preliminary performance results of the tool are also presented in this paper.  
RPPA05 Software Management of the LHC Detector Control Systems 532
 
  • F. Varela
    CERN, Geneva
 
  The control systems of each of the LHC experiments contain on the order of 150 computers running the back-end applications that are based on the PVSS SCADA package and the Joint Controls Project (JCOP) Framework. These inter-cooperating controls applications are being developed by different groups all around the world and have to be integrated by the experiments’ central controls teams. These applications will have to be maintained and eventually upgraded during the lifetime of the LHC experiments, ~20 years. This paper presents the centralized software management strategy based on the JCOP framework installation tool, a central repository shared by the different controls applications and an external database that holds the overall system configuration. The framework installation tool allows installation of software components in the sub-detector PVSS applications and eases integration of different parts of a control system. The information stored in the system configuration database can also be used by the installation tool to restore a computer in the event of failure. The central repository provides versioning of the various software components integrating the control system.  
RPPB07 The System Overview Tool of the Joint Controls Project (JCOP) Framework 618
 
  • M. Gonzalez-Berges, F. Varela
    CERN, Geneva
  • K. D. Joshi
    BARC, Mumbai
 
  For each control system of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments, there will be many processes spread over many computers. All together, they will form a PVSS distributed system with around 150 computers organized in a hierarchical fashion. A centralized tool has been developed for supervising, error identification and troubleshooting in such a large system. A quick response to abnormal situations will be crucial to maximize the physics usage. The tool gathers data from all the systems via several paths (e.g., process monitors, internal database) and, after some processing, presents it in different views: hierarchy of systems, host view and process view. The relations between the views are added to help to understand complex problems that involve more than one system. It is also possible to filter the information presented to the shift operator according to several criteria (e.g. node, process type, process state). Alarms are raised when undesired situations are found. The data gathered is stored in the historical archive for further analysis. Extensions of the tool are under development to integrate information coming from other sources (e.g., operating system, hardware).