INFN-LNF Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati
!CHAOS (*) is an open-source project, available therefore for free, created in the Frascati National Laboratories and developed in various INFN locations.
Originally oriented to the control of new accelerators for high energy physics, !CHAOS won a prize project funded by the Italian Ministry of Education thanks to which it was possible to continue to develop and investigate the installation also on “cloud” infrastructures.
The innovation of !CHAOS resides in placing the different services required by the control infrastructure in a “delocalised” manner on the network, ensuring scalability and thus integrating the advantages of modern systems developed to handle a large number of connections and a large amount of data.
!CHAOS has just finished a long test, managing control of the Beam Test Facility (BTF) of the Frascati National Laboratories and, for several consecutive weeks, it remained in operation without any interruption.
Operations were completed successfully thanks to an intense collaboration between the Accelerator Division and the Computer Centre, which developed the entire infrastructure used.
The !CHAOS project thus continues along its promising path for use also in fields other than accelerators, such as environmental monitoring, energy control or smart cities.
(*) Control system based on Highly Abstracted Operating Structure, but not – ! – a mess!
In the photo: the exclamation mark, which in programming language is the NOT operator, was produced by the control system by guiding the electron beam on a silicon detector.
