Australian Synchrotron, Part 1 - IT and controls (iTWire podcast)

Tony Austin
Tuesday, 30 September 2008 14:28

Opinion and Analysis

Richard Farnsworth, head of IT and controls at the Australian Synchrotron, in a series of podcasts for iTWire, gives fascinating insights into the control engineering and information technology used to operate this world-class particle accelerator.

The Australian Synchrotron is sited at Clayton near Monash University, some 20 Km southeast of central Melbourne.

It's not quite as massive as the Large Hadron Collider, but it was finished six months early, under budget, and ever since then has had an exceptionally high scheduled uptime. So let's claim, as we modest Aussies are wont to do, that it a case "not of what you've got, but what you do with what you've got!" (Or, "LHC, eat your heart out.")

The synchrotron is already very busy, conducting pure and applied research into both hard and soft (biological) matter, in many field such as imaging and medical therapy, powder and protein X-ray diffraction, infrared and X-ray absorption spectroscopy, protein crystallography, and lots more. You might get some idea of this by looking at this list of beamlines.

Richard Farnsworth (pictured), head of IT and controls at the Australian Synchrotron, showed me over this facility, which is about the size of a covered sportsground. We started at the control room, moved on to the server room, then went on a tour of the two rings to see just what all these computers were monitoring and controlling.

The emphasis of this iTWire podcast series is not on synchrotron science per se but on the challenges, achievements and plans related to particle accelerator control engineering and IT at this Australian facility..

This covers many quite diverse matters, such as: closely controlling the ring temperature, safety procedures and controls, hardware selection, operating systems and software development (a few surprises here), IT staffing, archiving and management of the huge amounts of data arising from beamline experiments.

Of course, reference will be made throughout the podcast recordings to synchrotron features and science. These won't be explained in the articles, so if you'd like to find out more about them please visit the Australian Synchrotron web site where you'll find plenty of background information and images.

Note that Australian Synchrotron Open Day 2008 is coming up on Sunday 26 October, 10 AM to 4 PM. Don't miss out. Entry is free but bookings are essential.

A tad more weighty is the Australian Synchrotron User Meeting & the Asia Oceania Forum 2008 -- or A-O Week -- being held in Melbourne from 1-5 December.

PLEASE READ ON...