Beijing launches ROC
Physicists use the new Asian remote operations center, located at the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing, China.
A new CMS remote operations center is now online at the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing, China.
The Beijing ROC made its first remote connection to the Fermilab ROC on July 14.
"They had pretty good data transmission," said Dan Green, Fermilab scientist and chair of the CMS collaboration board.
Fermilab pioneered the concept of CMS remote operation centers. DESY, a German particle physics laboratory, created a facility modeled after the Fermilab ROC.
Having a ROC in Asia will allow nearby scientists to take shifts when scientists at CERN or DESY would normally be sleeping. Scientists at IHEP expressed interest in getting involved with remote operations for CMS, and asked Fermilab for advice.
"IHEP has a big computing center, very professional computing people and they know what it takes to run an experiment," Green said.
These are crucial ingredients for a ROC capable of monitoring detector subsystems, Green said.
Fermilab began discussions with IHEP about building a ROC when Green and other Fermilab scientists visited China in March 2008. During the next 15 months, remote operations experts at Fermilab led by Kaori Maeshima, U.S. CMS remote operations coordinator, served as consultants for the Beijing team.
The Beijing ROC is operational just in time for the upcoming LHC restart.
"Now indeed, the sun never sets on CMS ROCs," Green said.
--Miriam Boon
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