OSDC Keynote - Synchrotron

Its always nice at conferences for there to a keynote or two that are on a semi-related but refreshingly off-topic nature. This one was a presentation by Richard Farnsworth of the Australian Synchrotron project giving us an introduction to the particle acceleration facility and the open-ish-source s/w they use to control much of the operation of the centre.

You could tell the Synchrotron was making an impression on the collection of geeks in the room, myself included, I'm not sure what it is but there seems to be a connection between an interest in IT and big scale engineering or science installations like this, there were even some pretty heavy physics questions coming from the floor at the conclusion of the talk.

There's no point in me reproducing the stuff in the talk here about the facility (which is based in Victoria), you can have a squizz yourself on the official Australian Synchrotron website.

After the scientific overview we heard how the centre uses automation, supervisory, data acquisition and control software known as EPICS that was developed over the years by many similar installations scattered round the world, and that since its declassification by the USA it is now shared amongst the community in a sort of open-source-ish licences.

It's many different modular pieces of work and a couple of millions of lines of code in all which they all contribute to and patch and redistribute to other centres. Some of the modules are more proprietary as their development was commercially supported so their licensing is a little more complex

The Australian facility uses Delphi to build a GUI in front of the back-end system and we saw some pretty impressive control interfaces and screenshots, but much of the back-end is written in C/C++. Each of the 25 beams in the hub of the Syncrotron is capable of producing about a Terrabyte of data each day, some pretty serious output.

Long term archival is obviously an issue but it turns out most experiements are only for an hour or so and are done on or by external research organisations (mostly off-shore) who then take the data away for analysis.

A fascinating talk.

See Also: OSDC 2006 | Web Development | Notes Index

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