Upgrading and enhancing the LHC logging system

At CERN, Switzerland, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator ever built, is about to start operational service for the first time. This complex machine of 27km circumference, located at 100m underground is subjected to many physical properties such as temperatures, electrical currents, vacuum pressures, etc... The Logging System was launched with the aim to track variations of these properties over time. This mission-critical system has been in operation since 2003: supporting the commissioning of the LHC sub-systems. It currently receives and stores more than 10 ́000 time series data per second coming from a wide range of heterogeneous clients. With the advancement of technology, the Data Loading element of the Logging System was faced with becoming obsolete. The work presented in this document involved the analysis and implementation of solutions in order to ensure the maintenance of the security and manageability of the Logging System Data Loading – using the latest available software platform. In addition a new aspect of the Logging System Data Loading was designed and fully implemented: to instrument and monitor Data Loading activity in an efficient, complete and powerful manner. With the instrumentation in place, effective analysis could be performed; resulting in correlations being identified between various aspects of the Data Loading activity/configurations and system performance. In turn, optimal configurations could be established to improve system performance.