Software management of the LHC detector control systems

The control systems of each of the four Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments will contain of the order of 150 computers running the back-end applications. These applications will have to be maintained and eventually upgraded during the lifetime of the experiments, ~20 years. This paper presents the centralized software management strategy adopted by the Joint COntrols Project (JCOP) [1], which is based on a central database that holds the overall system configuration. The approach facilitates the integration of different parts of a control system and provides versioning of its various software components. The information stored in the configuration database can eventually be used to restore a computer in the event of failure.