Who should apply?

How to apply?

Stipend

Students projects

Other activities

Who should apply?

How to apply?

Stipend

Students projects

Other activities

As a result of the tremendous development of GSM services over the last years, the number of related services used by organizations has drastically increased. Therefore, monitoring GSM services is becoming a business critical issue in order to be able to react appropriately in case of incident. In order to provide with GSM coverage all the CERN underground facilities, more than 50 km of leaky feeder cable have been deployed. This infrastructure is also used to propagate VHF radio signals for the CERN’s fire brigade. Even though CERN’s mobile operator monitors the network, it cannot guarantee the availability of GSM services, and for sure not VHF services, where signals are carried by the leaky feeder cable. So, a global monitoring system has become critical to CERN. In addition, monitoring this infrastructure will allow to characterize its behaviour over time, especially with LHC operation. Given that commercial solutions were not yet mature, CERN developed a system based on GSM probes and an application server which collects data from them via the CERN GPRS network. By placing probes in strategic locations and comparing measurements between probes, it is possible now possible to determine if there is a GSM or VHF problem on one leaky feeder cable segment. This system has been successfully working for several months in underground facilities, allowing CERN to inform GSM users and fire brigade in case of incidents.

CERN has a successful experience with running Server Self Service Center (S3C) for virtual server provisioning which is based on Microsoft® Virtual Server 2005. With the introduction of Windows Server 2008 and its built-in hypervisor based virtualization (Hyper-V) there are new possibilities for the expansion of the current service. This paper describes the architecture of the redesigned virtual Server Self Service based on Hyper-V which provides dynamically scalable virtualized resources on demand as needed and outlines the possible implications on the future use of virtual machines at CERN.

Scientists from all over the world need to collaborate with CERN on a daily basis. They must be able to communicate effectively on their joint projects at any time; as a result telephone conferences have become indispensable and widely used. Managed by 6 operators, CERN already has more than 20000 hours and 5700 audio-conferences per year. However, the traditional telephone based audio-conference system needed to be modernized in three ways. Firstly, to provide the participants with more autonomy in the organization of their conferences; secondly, to eliminate the constraints of manual intervention by operators; and thirdly, to integrate the audio-conferences into a collaborative working framework. The large number, and hence cost, of the conferences prohibited externalization and so the CERN telecommunications team drew up a specification to implement a new system. It was decided to use a new commercial collaborative audio-conference solution based on the SIP protocol. The system was tested as the first European pilot and several improvements (such as billing, security, redundancy...) were implemented based on CERN’s recommendations. The new automatic conference system has been operational since the second half of 2006. It is very popular for the users and has doubled the number of conferences in the past two years.

The status of high-energy physics (HEP) information systems has been jointly analyzed by the libraries of CERN, DESY, Fermilab and SLAC. As a result, the four laboratories have started the INSPIRE project – a new platform built by moving the successful SPIRES features and content, curated at DESY, Fermilab and SLAC, into the open-source CDS Invenio digital library software that was developed at CERN. INSPIRE will integrate present acquisition workflows and databases to host the entire body of the HEP literature (about one million records), aiming to become the reference HEP scientific information platform worldwide. It will provide users with fast access to full-text journal articles and preprints, but also material such as conference slides and multimedia. INSPIRE will empower scientists with new tools to discover and access the results most relevant to their research, enable novel text- and data-mining applications, and deploy new metrics to assess the impact of articles and authors. In addition, it will introduce the "Web 2.0" paradigm of user-enriched content in the domain of sciences, with community-based approaches to scientific publishing. INSPIRE represents a natural evolution of scholarly communication built on successful community-based information systems, and it provides a vision for information management in other fields of science. Inspired by the needs of HEP, we hope that the INSPIRE project will be inspiring for other communities.

The control systems of each of the four Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments will contain of the order of 150 computers running the back-end applications. These applications will have to be maintained and eventually upgraded during the lifetime of the experiments, ~20 years. This paper presents the centralized software management strategy adopted by the Joint COntrols Project (JCOP) [1], which is based on a central database that holds the overall system configuration. The approach facilitates the integration of different parts of a control system and provides versioning of its various software components. The information stored in the configuration database can eventually be used to restore a computer in the event of failure.

Starting from mid-2008, the ALICE detector at CERN LHC will collect data at a rate of 4PB per year. ALICE will use exclusively distributed Grid resources to store, process and analyse this data. The top-level management of the Grid resources is done through the AliEn (ALICE Environment) system, which is in continuous development since year 2000. AliEn presents several original solutions, which have shown their viability in a number of large exercises of increasing complexity called Data Challenges. This paper describes the AliEn architecture: Job Management, Data Management and UI. The current status of AliEn will be illustrated, as well as the performance of the system during the data challenges. The paper also describes the future AliEn development roadmap.

The CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) requires constant monitoring and control of quantities of parameters to guarantee operational conditions. For this purpose, a methodology called UNICOS (UNIfied Industrial COntrols Systems) has been implemented to standardize the design of process control applications. To further accelerate the development of these applications, we migrated our existing UNICOS tooling suite toward a software factory in charge of assembling project, domain and technical information seamlessly into deployable PLC (Programmable logic Controller) – SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) systems. This software factory delivers consistently high quality by reducing human error and repetitive tasks, and adapts to user specifications in a cost-efficient way. Hence, this production tool is designed to encapsulate and hide the PLC and SCADA target platforms, enabling the experts to focus on the business model rather than specific syntaxes and grammars. Based on industry standard software, this production tool together with the UNICOS methodology [1] provides a modular environment meant to support each process control expert to develop his solutions quickly. This article presents the user requirements of the software factory and the chosen approach. Then the focus moves to the benefits of the selected architecture, and ends up with the results and a vision for further improvements.

The supervisory layer of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments is based on the Prozeßvisualisierungs- und Steuerungsystem (PVSS) [1] and the Joint COntrols Project (JCOP) Framework (FW) [2]. This controls framework includes a Finite State Machine (FSM) toolkit, which allows to operate the control systems according to a well-defined set of states and commands. During the FSM transitions of the detectors, it is required to re-configure 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 FW FSM-Configuration database tool is presented. This tool ensures the availability of all required configuration data, for a given type of run of the experiment, in the PVSS sub-detector control applications. The chosen implementation strategy is discussed in the paper. The approach enables the standalone operation of different partitions of the detectors simultaneously while ensuring independent data handling.