From data storage towards decision making: LHC technical data integration and analysis

The monitoring of the beam conditions, equipment conditions and measurements from the beam instrumentation devices in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) produce more than 100 Gb/day of data. Such a big quantity of data is unprecedented in accelerator monitoring and new developments are needed to access, process, combine and analyse data from different equipments. The Beam Loss Monitoring (BLM) system has been one of the most reliable equipments in the LHC during its 2010 run, issuing beam dumps when the detected losses were above the defined abort thresholds. Furthermore, the BLM system was able to detect and study unexpected losses, requiring intensive offline analysis. This article describes the techniques developed to: access the data produced (' 50000 values/s); access relevant system layout information; access, combine and display different machine data.