Computer Applications in Nuclear and
Plasma Science Technical Committee

The CANPS award was granted to Edward Barsotti, formerly of Fermilab, during the RT2005 conference in Stockholm. Ed was not present at the Stockholm conference but an informal ceremony was organized at Fermilab on Feb. 22, 2006 and the award plaque and $2000 prize was presented to Ed at that occasion. This award is to recognize outstanding technical contributions to the fields of Nuclear and Plasma Sciences. Ed has been committed during his career to data acquisition issues. He has contributed to the definition of the FASTBUS and VME standards, and has been innovative in the design of the modern event building architecture now seen in most large experiments (scalable parallel open architecture data acquisition systems, switch networks, etc). Ed was also the first chair of the CANPS committee, when the Real Time conferences first became fully sponsored by IEEE. This was in 1984. Before that date, the Real Time Conferences were organized by ad hoc committees (RT79, RT81 and RT83),
The RT07 conference will be organized in late spring of 2007 at Fermilab, from April 29 to May 4, 2007. Margaret Votava, a 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 already a few presentations in this field at the RT2003 and more at 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 workgroup under the guidance of Satish Dawhan, from Yale, and Raymond Larsen, from SLAC, studying the applications of new industrial standards like ATCA. The RT conference is the perfect forum for studying the impact of new industrial standards in our field, as it has been 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