Calculation of abort thresholds for the Beam Loss Monitoring System of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN

The Beam Loss Monitoring (BLM) System is one of the most critical machine protection systems for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Switzerland. Its main purpose is to protect the superconducting magnets from quenches and other equipment from damage by requesting a beam abort when the measured losses exceed any of the predefined threshold levels. The system consist of circa 4000 ionization chambers which are installed around the 27 kilometres ring (LHC). This study aims to choose a technical platform and produce a system that addresses all of the limitations with the current system that is used for the calculation of the LHC BLM abort threshold values. To achieve this, a comparison and benchmarking of the Java and .NET technical platforms is performed in order to establish the most suitable solution. To establish which technical platform is a successful replacement of the current abort threshold calculator, comparable prototype systems in Java and .NET were developed. Both systems were benchmarked on performance of the computation of abort threshold values and speed of database storage. Findings of the study have shown that .NET platform is 12% faster than Java in the computation of the abort threshold values. Furthermore .NET is 20 times faster than Java in the database storage, which is statistically highly significant. However the study also found downfalls of the .NET, interoperability. Java is a cross-platform that may run on Microsoft Windows, Linux and Mac OS, whereas .NET can run only on Microsoft Windows. The study found that both technical platforms have their strengths and limitations. Additionally, the environment in which the technical platform will be used was found to be important because, in some cases, performance is not the most vital part of the system. This study has addressed all the limitations of the CERN's calculator approach. The system will be ported into the BLM LHC architecture to help protect the most powerful particle accelerator in the world.