“Computing and controls at Diamond Light Source”

Thursday October 3, 2013

“Computing and controls at Diamond Light Source”

Nick Rees, Principal Software Engineer, Diamond Light Source

Diamond Light Source is the UK National Synchrotron facility and is now approaching the end of its seventh year of operation with over 20 beamlines in operation and funding for 33. It has taken the approach of providing central support groups for a lot of the core disciplines, rather than depending on beamline staff and funding to provide services for each beamline. This talk introduces Diamond, and describes the challenges faced by the support teams, focussing particularly on the computing and controls challenges posed by modern high rate detectors. In particular, the IT infrastructure at Diamond is world leading within the synchrotron community and is designed to handle the data rate from many beamlines generating data at 10 GbE speeds simultaneously.