Upgrades to the Infrastructure and Management of the Operator Workstations and Servers for Run 2 of the CERN Accelerator Complex

The Controls Group of the CERN Beams Department provides more than 400 operator workstations in the CERN Control Centre (CCC) and technical buildings of the accelerators, plus 300 servers in the server room (CCR) of the CCC. During the long shutdown of the accelerators that started in February 2013, many upgrades were done to improve this infrastructure in view of the higher-energy LHC run. The Engineering Department improved the electrical supply with fully redundant UPS, on-site diesel generators and for the CCR, water and air cooling systems. The Information Technology Department increased network bandwidth for the servers by a factor of 10 and introduced a pilot multicast service for the video streaming of the accelerator status displays and beam cameras. The Controls Group removed dependencies on network file systems for the operator accounts they manage for the Linacs, Booster, PS, ISOLDE, AD, CTF3, SPS, LHC and cryogenics. It also moved away from system administration based on shell scripts to using modern tools like version-controlled Ansible playbooks, which are now used for installation, day-to-day re-configuration and staged updates during technical stops.