Software or Hardware
Software or Hardware
Is all the "fun" happening overnight (April 26th/27th) software glitches, hardware glitches, combinations? It seems like there is a fair bit of programming (as you'd expect) going on, "on the fly." Is that what most of this testing before 7TeV per beam is all about; the software/hardware handshakes and cooperation? All those alrams would make me twitchy!
Re: Software or Hardware
I think that basically they are learning how to drive the LHC at low speed before they take it out on the expressway....
Re: Software or Hardware
Running such a big hardware is not easy. No piece of electronics works flawlessly for eternity and there's such an awful lot of it in LHC there's no wonder something goes wrong on daily basis. That's why all LHC systems are backed up or redundant, without it LHC wouldn't be able to run at all.
Software isn't perfect either. There's a lot of software used in LHC, every piece of hardware uses slightly different control system and although a lot of time and effort was spent on fixing all problems and making them work together there are still minor bugs and problems left to be discovered and fixed over time.
For a project of such size, these factors are no surprise - approximate times between hardware/software failures and times needed for fixing are in fact included in their plans. Nobody can predict what exactly will go wrong but it can be estimated how much and how often on average.
Software isn't perfect either. There's a lot of software used in LHC, every piece of hardware uses slightly different control system and although a lot of time and effort was spent on fixing all problems and making them work together there are still minor bugs and problems left to be discovered and fixed over time.
For a project of such size, these factors are no surprise - approximate times between hardware/software failures and times needed for fixing are in fact included in their plans. Nobody can predict what exactly will go wrong but it can be estimated how much and how often on average.
Re: Software or Hardware
The LHC has so many controls (I estimate about a million) that have to be set in exactly the right way in exactly the right order. They do this in three steps:
So, at first you get the impression that everything went wrong, then you get the impression that they appear to understand the process, and finally there seems to be no problem at all!
- First they figure out how to set everything.
- Then they try this out by hand.
- Than they automate the procedure.
So, at first you get the impression that everything went wrong, then you get the impression that they appear to understand the process, and finally there seems to be no problem at all!
- Tau