| Since
the September issue of the NPSS newsletter, the activity of our
Technical Committee has concentrated around two important events.
First, Richard Jacobsson has been elected as the new voting AdCom
member representing the CANPS Technical Committee. We deeply thank
Patrick LeDû who has served very actively in this position
since 2001 and who brought new life to the CANPS committee. Patrick
LeDû, from C.E.A. Saclay in France, was the general chairman
of the first NSS-MIC conference ever held in Europe. This was in
Lyon, in year 2000. Richard Jacobsson was the general chairman of
the very successful RT2005 Real Time Conference held in Stockholm,
in June 2005 (see the September 2005 newsletter).
Richard Jacobsson is a Staff Physicist at the European Organization
for Nuclear Research (CERN) and since 2000 has worked for the LHCb
experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. At the LHCb he is responsible
for the development and commissioning of one of the three subsystems
of the LHCb online system, the Timing and Fast Control system, as
well as being involved in the implementation of the overall control
system. He is also the outreach representative for LHCb.
Richard Jacobsson received a Ph.D. in Physics in 1996 and a B.Sc.
in Physics in 1992 from the University of Stockholm, Sweden. Between
1991 and 2000 he worked on the DELPHI experiment at CERN. His major
achievements were the search for the Higgs boson, the measurement
of the ZZ production cross section, the upgrade of the entire DELPHI
data acquisition system in 1996-1998 and on-site responsibility
for the DELPHI barrel electromagnetic calorimeter. In the search
for the Higgs boson he pioneered the deployment of Neural Networks
as an important physics analysis method.
Secondly, the preparation of the next Real Time conference is actively
underway. The 2007 RT conference will be organized in late spring
2007 at Fermilab. Margaret Votava, member of the FNAL computing
division, will be the general chairperson of the conference. Several
adaptations of this “user friendly” small conference
are foreseen and are under discussion amongst the CANPS committee
members. For 2007, in addition to the standard Particle and Nuclear
Physics real time aspects, we want to promote new fields. For example,
Biomedical Imaging real time data acquisition and processing is
becoming a real challenge for the future. There were a few presentations
in this field at both the RT2003 and RT2005 conferences, and the
synergy with our traditional activities was greatly appreciated.
Also, the decision to build ITER, the next generation of experimental
fusion reactors, will generate new challenges in real- time control
systems. These two examples show how rich and exciting the Real
Time field will be in the near future. In addition, we have a small
work group under the guidance of Satish Dawan, from Yale, and Raymond
Larsen, from SLAC, studying the applications of new industrial standards
like ATCA. The RT conference is the perfect forum for exchanging
and discussing early experiences with such standards, just as it
was in the past for NIM, CAMAC, FASTBUS and VME.
Jean-Pierre Martin, chair of the Computer Applications in Nuclear
and Plasma Science Technical Committee, can be reached at the University
of Montreal, RJA Lévesque Laboratory, Montreal (QC), Canada
H3C 3J7. Phone +1 514 343 7340; E-mail: jpmartin@lps.umontreal.ca
|
