ALICE doffs hat to two companies

During the fifth annual ALICE Industrial Awards ceremony, the ALICE Collaboration honoured two companies for their outstanding contributions to the construction of the experiment.

For the past five years, the ALICE collaboration has been presenting its industrial partners with awards for meeting demanding or unusual requirements, for excellence in design or execution, for delivery on-time and on-budget and for outstanding cooperation. This year, on 9 March, ALICE presented awards to two companies for their exceptional performance.

From left to right: Kees Oskamp (ALICE SSD), Arie de Haas (ALICE SSD), Gert-Jan Nooren (ALICE SSD), Shon Shmuel (FIBERNET), Yehuda Mor-Yosef (FIBERNET), Hans Boggild (ALICE), Jurgen Schukraft (ALICE Spokesperson), Catherine Decosse (ALICE) and Jean-Robert Lutz (ALICE SSD).

FIBERNET Ltd., based in Yokneam, Israel, was rewarded for the excellent and timely assembly of the Silicon Strip Detector boards (SSD) of the Inner Tracking System with cable connections. Special low-mass cables, a mere millimetre across in diameter, connect the inner parts of the Silicon Strip Detector to the outside world. The combination of both ‘ normal'-sized power wires and two types of shielded twisted pairs makes the assembly challenging enough, but due to the limited space at the very heart of ALICE, it was required that the assembly had no twist between the three sets of conductors. Assembly tests, performed in various laboratories, showed that this was difficult to achieve. FIBERNET, however, created assemblies of cables that were supple and could easily be laid in any desired curve. Although these are relatively small cables, the assembly was no small task: the cables contain a total number of 25000 wires amounting to a total length of 80 km.

From left to right: Jurgen Schukraft (ALICE Spokesperson), Pierre vande Vyvre (ALICE DAQ), Hans Boggild (ALICE), Ewan Johnston (Quantum Corp.), Derek Barrilleaux (Quantum Corp.), Lance Hukill (Quantum Corp.), Ulrich Fuchs (ALICE DAQ), Catherine Decosse (ALICE) and Roberto Divia (ALICE DAQ).

Quantum Corp, of San Jose, USA, was honoured for the high performance cluster file system (StorNext) that has been deployed for the ALICE Data Acquisition (DAQ) system, as well as for its outstanding cooperation and support in implementing the software. With a gigabyte of data generated every second, the ALICE experiment demands a rock-solid data acquisition and storage system. During the last few years, the ALICE DAQ project has been developing a cutting-edge information management system to help capture and record the data at a level that will allow it to process more than a Petabyte of data per month. Although the data can be archived on the CERN mass storage systems in the computing centre, ALICE required a way to temporarily store the data before it could be transferred. After extensive testing, the ALICE collaboration chose Quantum StorNext for its significantly higher performance. This, along with the company's particularly cooperative and helpful attitude both before and after the test period, led ALICE to present Quantum StorNext with this industrial award.