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The main activity
of the CANPS technical committee in the last few months was the
venue of the 14th Real Time conference at the Alba Nova University
Center in Stockholm. The conference, chaired by Richard Jacobsson,
was very successful and was attended by 200 participants. Two short
courses were offered: one about Gigabit Networking for Data Acquisition
Systems, and the other on “System on Programmable Chip.”
There were close to 60 participants for each of the short courses.
The 2005 CANPS Outstanding Achievement Award was given to Ed Barsotti,
from Fermilab. 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 very innovative in the design of the
modern event-building architecture that we see now in most large
experiments (scalable parallel open architecture data acquisition
systems, switch networks, etc). We should remember also that at
the very beginning (RT79, RT81 and RT83) the Real Time Conferences
were organized by ad hoc committees. The association of the RT conferences
with IEEE-NPSS was concluded only after the RT83 Berkeley conference.
In 1984, the IEEE-NPSS CANPS technical committee was created to
manage the future RT conferences, and Ed Barsotti was the first
chair of this newly born CANPS committee.
The composition of the CANPS committee is now updated every two
years, at the time of the RT conference. New rules about the duties
of the committee members have been established. There were 20 CANPS
members present at the Stockholm conference and the committee had
a formal meeting at this occasion. The site for RT2007 conference
was discussed. It will be organized in the U.S. and one open option
is Fermilab, although no firm decision has been taken yet, as we
are waiting for more information about the logistics and the budget.
A small committee has been formed to investigate the possible organization
of RT2009 in Asia.
The CANPS committee has announced at the conference a new service,
called “Open-Card.” The goal of this service is to provide
a repository of information in the field of data acquisition systems,
and provide a convenient way to share the developments made by the
participants. The topics include hardware modules, ASICs, firmware,
and software packages. The data base includes a short description
of the items, and references to contact the authors. The servers
are located at TRIUMF (Canada) and at the Paul Scherrer Institute
(PSI) in Switzerland. It can be accessed on the WEB at www.open-card.org.
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.
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