IT-CO Activities Controls Review

Overview Mandate: ‘Provide controls support to CERN experiments – primarily LHC’ Organized in two sections BE and FE BE responsible for backend technologies and their support FE responsible for frontend and NI technologies and their support 15 staff and 8 visitors (PJAS, TECH, Fellow, etc.) IT MTP shows current staff level being maintained until 2010 Summary of IT/CO Activities - 2

CERN-wide Support - I PVSS First-line support , including related technologies, e.g. Qt, Oracle,.. Technical contact to the company, including the participation in joint developments, e.g. Oracle archiving Generation of licenses for LHC experiments Acting as interface partner to obtain licenses for other projects Provision of consultancy and training courses Summary of IT/CO Activities - 3

CERN-wide Support - II OPC NI LabView Technical support for OPC CERN representative on OPC Foundation Specification and validation of certain OPC servers NI LabView Technical support for NI products, particularly LabView License management Technical contact to NI for all products used at CERN Organization of training courses Summary of IT/CO Activities - 4

CERN-wide Support - III CANBus Technical support for the CANBus fieldbus DIP Support and maintenance for the Data Interchange Protocol Operation of the DIP DNS Security Leading CNIC effort Participation in CERN security team Provision of TOCSSIC security vulnerability test environment Presentation title - 5

Support to Experiments - I Direct experiment support Contact person for each experiment Consultancy and debugging support for experiments teams Front-end technologies General support and consultancy for front-end technologies (e.g. ProfiBus and ModBus), including middleware (e.g. DIM) Summary of IT/CO Activities - 6

Support to Experiments - II PLC Consultancy to the physics community on the use of PLCs as well as first-line support for them SLiC Development and maintenance of an OO front-end framework written in C++ and used by COMPASS Summary of IT/CO Activities - 7

Development, Support and Maintenance JCOP Framework (used by LHC experiments, COMPASS, some aspects by the UNICOS team and previously used by HARP and NA60) Development/maintenance of many components Provision of training courses Gas Control System (GCS) Development and maintenance of 24 applications built using the GCS Model-Based Framework (benefits from UNICOS) Detector Safety System (DSS) Development and maintenance of data driven application for 4 LHC experiments Summary of IT/CO Activities - 8

Relations with other Groups LHC experiments and sub-detectors COMPASS DCS Team NA48 DCS Team UNICOS Team PH-ESE PH-DTI-Gas IT/DES, IT/PSS (PVSS Oracle archiving) IT/IS, IT/FIO, IT/CS (CNIC) TS/CV, TS/EL, TS/CSE Summary of IT/CO Activities - 9

Positives - I Significant developments done with (very) limited resources Able to achieve commonality in many areas A well defined, and appreciated, support in a neutral department Good mixture of development and support Some synergy with central support services, e.g. use of cvs, Remedy, Savannah, Oracle Summary of IT/CO Activities - 11

Positves - II Were able to get Fellow/PJAS when necessary to supplement effort (paid for by PH) Good collaboration with other teams, e.g. UNICOS (even though no formal agreements) GSC and DSS development approach Presentation title - 12

Negatives Resource limited ‘Too limited’ mandate Lack of flexibility (sickness, holiday) Knowledge with too few people Missed opportunities, e.g. MCS, COMPASS, more detailed developments for LHC expts, etc. (Development done less efficiently elsewhere) ‘Too limited’ mandate Split of H/W (PH/ESE, PH/DT1) and S/W Moving into maintenance Overlap with other groups, e.g. AB/CO, PH-DT1 Summary of IT/CO Activities - 13

Summary Good Service to experiments (technical support and application development) CERN-wide services but should avoid duplication Bad Need more flexibility (resources) Widen mandate (vertically and horizontally) Overlap with other groups Formal collaborations? Summary of IT/CO Activities - 14