Visualization of historical data for the ATLAS detector controls - DDV

Abstract

The ATLAS experiment is one of four detectors located on the Large Hardon Collider (LHC) based at CERN. Its detector control system (DCS) stores the slow control data acquired within the back-end of distributed WinCC OA applications, which enables the data to be retrieved for future analysis, debugging and detector development in an Oracle relational database. The ATLAS DCS Data Viewer (DDV) is a client-server application providing access to the historical data outside of the experiment network. The server builds optimized SQL queries, retrieves the data from the database and serves it to the clients via HTTP connections. The server also implements protection methods to prevent malicious use of the database. The client is an AJAX-type web application based on the Vaadin (framework build around the Google Web Toolkit (GWT)) which gives users the possibility to access the data with ease. The DCS metadata can be selected using a column-tree navigation or a search engine supporting regular expressions. The data is visualized by a selection of output modules such as a java script value-over time plots or a lazy loading table widget. Additional plugins give the users the possibility to retrieve the data in ROOT format or as an ASCII file. Control system alarms can also be visualized in a dedicated table if necessary. Python mock-up scripts can be generated by the client, allowing the user to query the pythonic DDV server directly, such that the users can embed the scripts into more complex analysis programs. Users are also able to store searches and output configurations as XML on the server to share with others via URL or to embed in HTML.