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- C. Gaspar, F. Alessio, L.G. Cardoso, M. Frank, J.C. Garnier, R. Jacobsson, B. Jost, N. Neufeld, R. Schwemmer, E. van Herwijnen
CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
- O. Callot
LAL, Orsay, France
- B. Franek
STFC/RAL, Chilton, Didcot, Oxon, United Kingdom
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LHCb is a large experiment at the LHC accelerator. The experiment control system is in charge of the configuration, control and monitoring of the different sub-detectors and of all areas of the online system: the Detector Control System (DCS), sub-detector's voltages, cooling, temperatures, etc.; the Data Acquisition System (DAQ), and the Run-Control; the High Level Trigger (HLT), a farm of around 1500 PCs running trigger algorithms; etc. The building blocks of the control system are based on the PVSS SCADA System complemented by a control Framework developed in common for the 4 LHC experiments. This framework includes an "expert system" like tool called SMI++ which we use for the system automation. The full control system runs distributed over around 160 PCs and is logically organised in a hierarchical structure, each level being capable of supervising and synchronizing the objects below. The experiment's operations are now almost completely automated driven by a top-level object called Big-Brother which pilots all the experiment's standard procedures and the most common error-recovery procedures. Some examples of automated procedures are: powering the detector, acting on the Run-Control (Start/Stop Run, etc.) and moving the vertex detector in/out of the beam, all driven by the state of the accelerator or recovering from errors in the HLT farm. The architecture, tools and mechanisms used for the implementation as well as some operational examples will be shown.
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