More than 160 kilometers of cables and 6,000 pieces of electronic equipment, industrial computers, PLCs, motors, robots, instruments, etc. are involved in the control of the accelerators and beamlines. The linear accelerator, radio frequency system, magnets, power supplies, diagnostic elements, beamline instrumentation are all synchronized via optic fiber with a precision that can measure in tens of picoseconds or 0.00000000001 seconds, the time light takes to travel 0.3 millimeters.
The Personnel Safety System - PSS - and Equipment Protection System - EPS - monitor more than 10,000 variables, such as: temperature, pressure, flow or radiation level in order to control the access and operation of the accelerators and beamlines.
Each experiment end-station may generate up to 300 megabytes of data per second which has to be transferred, via high speed network infrastructures, to central data storage, often requiring online data evaluation, archiving and remote access.
More than 1600 synchrotron users are registered on the ALBA User Office Portal and between them have submitted 733 experiment proposals, of which 402 have been granted with beam time. More than a thousand scientists have accepted our invitation to carry out their experiment at our facility.
ALBA Computing & Control Division is a pioneer among large public research facilities in implementing industry best practices - PRINCE2 and ITIL - for IT project and service management.
Our team includes 16 control system engineers, 7 electronics engineers and 5 electronics technicians, 8 system administrators, 6 information system engineers and 1 quality manager.
SERVICES
CONTROL SYSTEMS | ELECTRONICS | MIS MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS |
IT SYSTEMS | SCIENTIFIC DATA MANAGEMENT | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
GENERAL CONTROLPersonnel Safety System ACCELERATORSTiming System EXPERIMENTDetectors OPEN SOURCE SYNCHROTRON COLLABORATIONSTANGO - distributed control systems for synchrotron accelerators and experiments SARDANA and TAURUS - non-profit FOSS development projects of the Control Systems for Instrumentation and Data Acquisition ICEPAP CMS - motion control |
ELECTRONIC ENGINEERINGElectronic Design INFRASTRUCTURECabling TECHNICAL SUPPORTInstrumentation |
DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONALBA User Office Portal OPERATION MANAGEMENTAccess Control HUMAN RESOURCES MANAGEMENTEmployment Office ADMINISTRATIONBudget Management QUALITY MANAGEMENTService & Project Management |
IT OPERATIONSApplication Hosting USER SERVICESDesktop Virtualization SUPPORTService Desk |
DATA PROCESSING / ANALYSISScientific software installation and update DATA MANAGEMENTData custody |