Author: Nunes, R.
Paper Title Page
MOPPC054 Application of Virtualization to CERN Access and Safety Systems 214
 
  • T. Hakulinen, J.B. Lopez Costa, P. Ninin, H. Nissen, R. Nunes
    CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
 
  Access and safety systems are by nature heterogeneous: different kinds of hardware and software, commercial and home-grown, are integrated to form a working system. This implies many different application services, for which separate physical servers are allocated to keep the various subsystems isolated. Each such application server requires special expertise to install and manage. Furthermore, physical hardware is relatively expensive and presents a single point of failure to any of the subsystems, unless designed to include often complex redundancy protocols. We present the Virtual Safety System Infrastructure project (VSSI), whose aim is to utilize modern virtualization techniques to abstract application servers from the actual hardware. The virtual servers run on robust and redundant standard hardware, where snapshotting and backing up of virtual machines can be carried out to maximize availability. Uniform maintenance procedures are applicable to all virtual machines on the hypervisor level, which helps to standardize maintenance tasks. This approach has been applied to the servers of CERN PS and LHC access systems as well as to CERN Safety Alarm Monitoring System (CSAM).  
poster icon Poster MOPPC054 [1.222 MB]  
 
MOPPC055 Revisiting CERN Safety System Monitoring (SSM) 218
 
  • T. Hakulinen, P. Ninin, R. Nunes, T.R. Riesco
    CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
 
  CERN Safety System Monitoring (SSM) is a system for monitoring state-of-health of the various access and personnel safety systems at CERN since more than three years. SSM implements monitoring of different operating systems, network equipment, storage, and special devices like PLCs, front ends, etc. It is based on the monitoring framework Zabbix, which supports alert notifications, issue escalation, reporting, distributed management, and automatic scalability. The emphasis of SSM is on the needs of maintenance and system operation, where timely and reliable feedback directly from the systems themselves is important to quickly pinpoint immediate or creeping problems. A new application of SSM is to anticipate availability problems through predictive trending that allows to visualize and manage upcoming operational issues and infrastructure requirements. Work is underway to extend the scope of SSM to all access and safety systems managed by the access and safety team with upgrades to the monitoring methodology as well as to the visualization of results.  
poster icon Poster MOPPC055 [1.537 MB]  
 
MOPPC057 Data Management and Tools for the Access to the Radiological Areas at CERN 226
 
  • E. Sanchez-Corral Mena, P. Carbonez, A. Dorsival, G. Dumont, K. Foraz, T. Hakulinen, F. Havart, M.P. Kepinski, S. Mallon Amerigo, P. Martel, P. Ninin, R. Nunes, F. Valentini, J. Vollaire
    CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
 
  As part of the refurbishment of the PS Personnel Protection system, the radioprotection (RP) buffer zones & equipment have been incorporated into the design of the new access points providing an integrated access concept to the radiation controlled areas of the PS complex. The integration of the RP and access control equipment has been very challenging due to the lack of space in many of the zones. Although successfully carried out, our experience from the commissioning of the first installed access points shows that the integration should also include the software tools and procedures. This paper presents an inventory of all the tools and data bases currently used (*) in order to ensure the access to the CERN radiological areas according to CERN’s safety and radioprotection procedures. We summarize the problems and limitations of each tool as well as the whole process, and propose a number of improvements for the different kinds of users including changes required in each of the tools. The aim is to optimize the access process and the operation & maintenance of the related tools by rationalizing and better integrating them.
(*) Access Distribution and Management, Safety Information Registration, Works Coordination, Access Control, Operational Dosimeter, Traceability of Radioactive Equipment, Safety Information Panel.
 
poster icon Poster MOPPC057 [1.955 MB]  
 
MOPPC061 Achieving a Highly Configurable Personnel Protection System for Experimental Areas 238
 
  • F. Havart, D. Chapuis, R. Nunes, D. Vaxelaire
    CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
 
  The personnel protection system of the secondary beam experimental areas at CERN manages the beam and access interlocking mechanism. Its aim is to guarantee the safety of the experimental area users against the hazards of beam radiation and laser light. The highly configurable, interconnected, and modular nature of those areas requires a very versatile system. In order to follow closely the operational changes and new experimental setups and to still keep the required level of safety, the system was designed with a set of matrices which can be quickly reconfigured. Through a common paradigm, based on industrial hardware components, this challenging implementation has been made for both the PS and SPS experimental halls, according to the IEC 61508 standard. The current system is based on a set of hypotheses formed during 25 years of operation. Conscious of the constant increase in complexity and the broadening risk spectrum of the present and future experiments, we propose a framework intended as a practical guide to structure the design of the experimental layouts based on risk evaluation, safety function prescriptions and field equipment capabilities.  
poster icon Poster MOPPC061 [2.241 MB]