Tools and Services

Content

Mandate
Technologies
Products
Team Members
Alumni

Mandate

The CCS Tools Team designs, develops, maintains and supports a variety of different expert tools and software services for the SY-EPC group, accelerator operations, and external laboratories. This includes the full stack of web applications, web services, background services (daemons), databases, periodic tasks (gitlab ci/cd, cronjobs), desktop applications as well as software libraries and utilities. Furthermore, the Tools Team is involved in the configuration and maintenance of the container and web server infrastructure on which the mentioned applications and services are deployed.

Technologies

Web Front-End	JavaScript Vue3.js Pinia ViteJS Bootstrap 5 CSS3 HTML5
Web Back-End	Python FastAPI Django SQLAlchemy Pydantic
Databases	PostgreSQL Oracle
Background Services	Python Perl (phasing out)
Libraries and Utilities	JavaScript Python Perl (phasing out)
DevOps	Git GitLab CI/CD GitLab Issues Docker/Podman Kubernetes (k8s) Atlassian Jira Issues Atlassian Confluence Wiki Apache Nginx

Products

The tools team provides a variety of software services, packages and applications. Unfortunately, our tools suite is only available in our intranet which is why can not show case them here. The only exception, which is available to the general public, is our standalone version of PowerSpy.

Web Applications and Web Services

A REST API that serves as the back-end of several of our web applications and background services. It provides centralized access to FGC related data and devices.

A simple web application that allows converter experts to map their hardware equipment to a certain barcode format and thereby associate it to persisted configuration properties used by FGCs.

The main power converter expert tool. It allows them to monitor and interact with the FGCs that are used to control the power converters which power the magnets in the accelerators.

A web application that provides an overview of the status of all FGC devices installed in CERNs accelerator complexes. Currently, there are more than 5000 FGC devices installed.

The official FGC documentation web pages. These pages document the software classes and property interfaces that experts use to interact with FGCs.

A simple application grid that provides access to all web applications of the EPC-CCS tools suite.

A web application that helps converter experts to manage the configuration of their FGCs. Each of the more than 5000 FGCs installed at CERN can have hundreds of configuration properties associated. These are stored in a database and are ready for automatic configuration via the Configuration Manager background service.

A web based terminal interface that provides remote access to the integrated terminal of our FGC devices.

A web application that allows converter experts to create and maintain configurations for pairs of operational and spare FGCs. This allows us to use one spare device as a potential replacement of several other FGC devices which is much more cost efficient than having one spare per device.

A web application that allows FGC designers to implement and maintain automated tests for FGC embedded software and hardware.

A REST API and PostgreSQL database used provide access to stored acquisitions of signals, which can be visualized in the PowerSpy web application.

FRESCO stands for 'Frequency RESponse-based Controller Optimization'. It is a tool that helps converter experts to run experiments in order to optimize the control settings of their FGCs.

PowerSpy is a web application that allows power converter experts to visualize and analyze signals that can be acquired by the power converters' control system. Note: the version that is linked here is the publicly accessible version of powerspy and only supports visualisation of local log files.

Background Services (Daemons)

A daemon which is responsible for synchronizing the configuration of FGC devices from and to the database. It allows automated configuration of devices on startup and helps to persist optimized configurations.

Monitors FGC devices. Reads their log buffers and stores them for later inspection (e.g. post mortem analysis, after a power converter tripped).

Allows remote re-programming of FGC sub-modules. These sub-modules are RegFGC3 electronic cards / boards that are designed and maintained by our colleagues of the EPC-CCE section.

Monitors FGCD devices, which are the gateway computers of FGC devices. It automatically notifies experts in case an instance goes down.

Libraries, Packages, Modules, Utilities

The list of python and perl libraries developed and maintained by the Tools Team is too big and too specific to be presented here. However, they can be seen as lower level bits and pieces that are used by the higher level applications and services mentioned above.