THE STATUS OF THE LHC CONTROLS SYSTEM SHORTLY BEFORE INJECTION OF BEAM

At the time of the ICALEPCS 2007 conference, the LHC main accelerator will be close to its final state of installation, and major components will have passed the so-called “hardware commissioning.” In this paper the requirements and the main components of the LHC control system will be described very briefly. Out of its classical 3-tier architecture, those solutions will be presented, which correspond to major development work done here at CERN. Focus will be given to the present status of these developments and to lessons learned in the past months. THE CONTROLS INFRASTRUCTURE The LHC controls infrastructure is based on the classical 3-tier architecture as described in fig.1. Figure 1: The LHC controls infrastructure. It is a new software and hardware architecture built with the many years of experience of controlling the CERN injector chain. The level of effort estimated devoted to the LHC controls amounts to 300 my and 21 MSFR over 4 years. The following paragraphs will describe each of the 3 tier of fig.1.