Speaker
Description
Experiments done at the 88-Inch Cyclotron at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to study super heavy elements and their basic physics and chemistry using the Berkeley Gas-filled Separator (BGS) and For the Identification of Nuclide A (FIONA) apparatuses are complex and employ dozens to hundreds of pieces of individual equipment setup in series and parallel along the beam-line.
Over the past two years experimental improvements were made by changing, upgrading, or otherwise converting each device to communicate with Ethernet and TCP/IP as opposed to other communication protocols such as serial RS-232, RS-485, USB, and GPIB. Getting each part of the experiment onto a common network allows for a centralized command and control structure, while enabling task flow automation to reduce human error and improve workflow efficiency. Additionally, this allows for a great simplification of the recording and logging of auxiliary data for each device to gain greater insight into the performance of the experiment and to identify issues with equipment before they occur, allowing for planned maintenance and downtime, thus reducing lost experiment time.
In this presentation I will discuss the details of how this was implemented using open-source software and modern software development and information technology operations (DevOps) practices, such as configuration as code, Docker containers, orchestration, continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD), etc. Special focus will paid to how the system was designed to be general and modular so that new parts can be easily added and removed as the experiments evolve overtime, and how it can be reproduced and applied elsewhere.
Support was provided by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics under contract DEAC02-05CH1123.