T. Henß

First experiences with the ATLAS pixel detector control system at the combined test beam 2004

Abstract Detector control systems (DCS) include the readout, control and supervision of hardware devices as well as the monitoring of external systems like cooling system and the processing of control data. The implementation of such a system in the final experiment also has to provide the communication with the trigger and data acquisition system (TDAQ). In addition, conditions data which describe the status of the pixel detector modules and their environment must be logged and stored in a common LHC wide database system. At the combined test beam all ATLAS subdetectors were operated together for the first time over a longer period. To ensure the functionality of the pixel detector, a control system was set up. We describe the architecture chosen for the pixel DCS, the interfaces to hardware devices, the interfaces to the users and the performance of our system. The embedding of the DCS in the common infrastructure of the combined test beam and also its communication with surrounding systems will be discussed in some detail.

Towards the final ATLAS Pixel Detector Control System

The innermost part of the ATLAS experiment is a pixel detector, built by 1744 individual detector modules. To operate the modules, readout electronics, and other detector components, a complex power supply and detector control system (DCS) is necessary. This includes a large number of crates, which house the different hardware components as well as a PC net where the different control projects are running. To test the final detector after its assembly before it is installed in the ATLAS cavern, a large test system has been set up at CERN, which allows to operate ca. 10 % of the detector in parallel. Since autumn 2006 this system is in permanent operation. As nearly everywhere the final control hardware is used, its reliability could be investigated and the performance of the control software could be studied. After an overview on our DCS hardware, we report on the experience with the control software.