J. Cook

The detector control system of the ATLAS experiment

The ATLAS experiment is one of the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, constructed to study elementary particle interactions in collisions of high-energy proton beams. The individual detector components as well as the common experimental infrastructure are supervised by the Detector Control System (DCS). The DCS enables equipment supervision using operator commands, reads, processes and archives the operational parameters of the detector, allows for error recognition and handling, manages the communication with external control systems, and provides a synchronization mechanism with the physics data acquisition system. Given the enormous size and complexity of ATLAS, special emphasis was put on the use of standardized hardware and software components enabling efficient development and long-term maintainability of the DCS over the lifetime of the experiment. Currently, the DCS is being used successfully during the experiment commissioning phase.

Data quality from the Detector Control System at the ATLAS experiment

At the ATLAS experiment, the Detector Control System (DCS) is used to oversee detector conditions and supervise the running of equipment. It is essential that information from the DCS about the status of individual sub-detectors be extracted and taken into account when determining the quality of data taken and its suitability for different analyses. DCS information is written to the ATLAS conditions database and then summarised to provide a status flag for each sub-detector and displayed on the web. We discuss how this DCS information should be used, and the technicalities of making this summary.