714
D. Froidevaux
moaning, the efforts of the Technical Co-ordination team have been crucial to the
success of the ATLAS and CMS projects:
• finding common (often commercial) solutions does not come easily to large
numbers of inventive and often opinionated physicists. Common solutions across
the experiments are even harder to achieve, although they have turned out to
be profitable to all parties in a number of areas. Clearly the strong research
and development programme launched in 1989 by CERN for the development
of the LHC detector technologies has been a key element in the definition of
the various detector concepts (radiation-hard silicon detectors and electronics,
electromagnetic and hadronic calorimetry, various tracking technologies, etc.).
In the areas where such common (often commercial) solutions have been
adopted in many cases in the past, the successes of the research and development
programme have been less spectacular (data transmission, specialised trigger
processors, various offline software developments), most probably because the
solutions emerging today were not easy to predict from the technology trends
of 20 years ago, when the worldwide web, mobile phones, inexpensive desktop
computing and high-speed networks did not exist.
The Technical Co-ordination team has certainly been very instrumental in
encouraging the collaboration to adopt common technical solutions and has also
delegated to the appropriate persons in the collaboration the mandate to negotiate
and agree these common solutions across the experiments: the frame contracts
with major micro-electronics suppliers, the gas systems, the power supplies, the
electronics crates and racks and the slow controls infrastructure hardware and
database software can be quoted as some of the more prominent examples.
• establishing a strong quality assurance and review process across the whole
collaboration is a must at an early stage in such complex projects, where standard
commercial products have often failed, sometimes for multiple reasons owing to
the boundary conditions in the experimental caverns (radiation background and
magnetic field).
As stated above, the review process (from conceptual engineering design
reviews, to production readiness and production advancement reviews) can be
very beneficial and even well accepted within the collaboration if it is kept
lightweight and perceived as executed by people involved in the project as all
the others rather than by an elite breed of top-level managers.
Most of the ATLAS and CMS Technical Design Reports quoted as references
in this review address quality assurance with ambitions and specifications, which
are fully justified on paper but much harder to implement in reality when facing
time pressure and the inevitable lack of human resources to fulfill every aspect of
the task. In relation to industry in particular, the effort required in monitoring
production of delicate components had been totally underestimated or even
ignored in the design phase. The reviews put in place by the Technical Coordination team have played an important role in keeping all aspects related
to schedule, resources and quality assurance under control during the detector
construction. They have also ensured that large groups with significant project
D. Froidevaux
moaning, the efforts of the Technical Co-ordination team have been crucial to the
success of the ATLAS and CMS projects:
• finding common (often commercial) solutions does not come easily to large
numbers of inventive and often opinionated physicists. Common solutions across
the experiments are even harder to achieve, although they have turned out to
be profitable to all parties in a number of areas. Clearly the strong research
and development programme launched in 1989 by CERN for the development
of the LHC detector technologies has been a key element in the definition of
the various detector concepts (radiation-hard silicon detectors and electronics,
electromagnetic and hadronic calorimetry, various tracking technologies, etc.).
In the areas where such common (often commercial) solutions have been
adopted in many cases in the past, the successes of the research and development
programme have been less spectacular (data transmission, specialised trigger
processors, various offline software developments), most probably because the
solutions emerging today were not easy to predict from the technology trends
of 20 years ago, when the worldwide web, mobile phones, inexpensive desktop
computing and high-speed networks did not exist.
The Technical Co-ordination team has certainly been very instrumental in
encouraging the collaboration to adopt common technical solutions and has also
delegated to the appropriate persons in the collaboration the mandate to negotiate
and agree these common solutions across the experiments: the frame contracts
with major micro-electronics suppliers, the gas systems, the power supplies, the
electronics crates and racks and the slow controls infrastructure hardware and
database software can be quoted as some of the more prominent examples.
• establishing a strong quality assurance and review process across the whole
collaboration is a must at an early stage in such complex projects, where standard
commercial products have often failed, sometimes for multiple reasons owing to
the boundary conditions in the experimental caverns (radiation background and
magnetic field).
As stated above, the review process (from conceptual engineering design
reviews, to production readiness and production advancement reviews) can be
very beneficial and even well accepted within the collaboration if it is kept
lightweight and perceived as executed by people involved in the project as all
the others rather than by an elite breed of top-level managers.
Most of the ATLAS and CMS Technical Design Reports quoted as references
in this review address quality assurance with ambitions and specifications, which
are fully justified on paper but much harder to implement in reality when facing
time pressure and the inevitable lack of human resources to fulfill every aspect of
the task. In relation to industry in particular, the effort required in monitoring
production of delicate components had been totally underestimated or even
ignored in the design phase. The reviews put in place by the Technical Coordination team have played an important role in keeping all aspects related
to schedule, resources and quality assurance under control during the detector
construction. They have also ensured that large groups with significant project