Another weekend of combined ATLAS running.
In the past we would try to exercise the combined system in these big ‘Milestone’ weeks. And those haven’t gone away but now as the beam looms nearer and nearer we have added weekly-weekend combined running as well.
In other words: There goes my summer completely.
ATLAS is just big. In all dimensions. In physical size, in the amount of electronics, in the number of computers, in the number of people. Everything. And so it is no wonder that when we try to get all the little parts of this big system running smoothly together it takes a lot of time.
And getting the system running is exactly what me and several others spent 17 consecutive hours doing last Friday. But! We had things to keep us happy. Initially I was bummed that I was stuck in the control room while the Euro cup quarter-finals were being played.
But hey, this is a high-tech experiment. With a very nice big flat screen, nominally used for displaying the beam parameters. But since there is no beam, why not use it to display… say… Croatia vs. Turkey…
By the end of the night, we had the combined run set-up and the game on the big screen. Here is the video which proves that while we were indeed watching the game, the run was actually going. As the footage was taken from a phone, it is a little hard to see but the zoom in on the computer screen shows a happily running detector. Really.
