iTWire: How close to the start of the synchrotron project were you involved, as an engineer?

Richard Farnsworth: I was the first practising engineer on. I was the most senior local engineer brought into the project, the others were all brought in from overseas.

ITWire: What were you doing it before that?

Richard Farnsworth: I was doing the water control system for Melbourne, which was a very complicated system of pipes and controls across a wide distributed network.

I worked on the railways signalling system for metropolitan railways. I've done plant control systems in gas and power stations as well. ... That type of  big enterprise instrumentation and control, that's my specialty field and that is what was needed on the synchrotron.

Please note that the above introductory segment of the interview with Richard was recorded with high ambient sound levels, as were some later segments. It needed some "forceful treatment" to reduce extraneous noise, therefore despite its short duration it is being made available as a separate audio file. You can download it from here (MP3 format, size 411 KB, duration 60 seconds).

We first visited the control room. Here, Richard described the dual-headed Linux systems used for the monitoring and control of the synchrotron, which among other things has over 300 beam-manipulating electromagnets needing exceedingly fine control.

There are screens for many things, such as logging, alarms, and a publicly-viewable Facility Status Monitor continually-updated display. (Notice that the URL for this seems to be http://vbl.synchrotron.org.au/fsm/ and not the URL that Richard quotes in the interview, but this might be only a temporary URL redirection problem.)

One quite notable figure that Richard mentions in this segment is the incredible reliability of the Australian Synchrotron, 99.9 percent of scheduled operating time.

In the control room, they use stock off-the-shelf (but high end) systems wherever possible. And development/deployment goes through a three-stage process, of which more in a subsequent podcast segment.

Finally, Richard explains that they don't use virtualization much, except for the so-called virtual beamline which enables remote experimenters to see much the same as if they were on-site.

You can download the Australian Synchrotron control room audio segment from here (MP3 format, size 2.6 MB, duration 5:32).

More to follow over the coming week or two, so watch this space!