Visual Display of Monitoring Data for Pixel Vertex Detector

Introduction

The ATLAS pixel vertex detector is critical to the physics program of the ATLAS experiment. Because of its complexity (80 million pixels) and inaccessibility in the core of the ATLAS detector, the pixel detector must be operated with great care and very closely monitored to ensure that it produces the required data over the planned lifetime of the device. While histograms and plots are important monitoring tools, it has been suggested that a visual display of critical detector information would be even more useful in spotting failures early on, especially for failure modes that can be spatially correlated such as overheating, power distribution problems and data acquisition errors. It has been proposed to create a visual display of monitoring data in the Java-based event display for ATLAS (Atlantis), so that this kind of monitoring can take place in real time as data is taken.

Possible Projects

• Understand the code used to render the event display and the data format used by Atlantis as input.
• Work with the Atlantis development team to design the code for displaying the data and the data format for each type of monitoring data.
• Work with the pixel monitoring experts to get the required data from the database into the format for Atlantis.
• Perfect the visualization of the data so that it is useful for monitoring the detector in a control room environment.

For additional information, contact Tim Nelson.