Computing & Controls Division manages anything related to electronic hardware or software: from cabling and electronic equipment, control systems for the accelerators and the beamlines, to IT infrastructures, IT services and information systems.

   

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 

 

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