The Simons Observatory: Overview of data acquisition, control, monitoring, and computer infrastructure
Brian J. Koopman, Jack Lashner, Lauren J. Saunders, Matthew, Hasselfield, Tanay Bhandarkar, Sanah Bhimani, Steve K. Choi, Cody J. Duell,, Nicholas Galitzki, Kathleen Harrington, Adam D. Hincks, Shuay-Pwu Patty Ho,, Laura Newburgh, Christian L. Reichardt, Joseph Seibert

TL;DR
The paper describes the design and implementation of the data acquisition, control, and monitoring infrastructure for the upcoming Simons Observatory, a large-scale CMB experiment with multiple telescopes and thousands of sensors.
Contribution
It introduces the open-source Observatory Control System (ocs) for managing distributed hardware and integrates various open source tools for remote monitoring and control.
Findings
Successful integration of subsystems via ocs platform
Effective remote monitoring and alerting system implemented
Lessons learned from hardware testing at SO labs
Abstract
The Simons Observatory (SO) is an upcoming polarized cosmic microwave background (CMB) survey experiment with three small-aperture telescopes and one large-aperture telescope that will observe from the Atacama Desert in Chile. In total, SO will field over 60,000 transition-edge sensor (TES) bolometers in six spectral bands centered between 27 and 280 GHz to achieve the sensitivity necessary to measure or constrain numerous cosmological parameters, including the tensor-to-scalar ratio, effective number of relativistic species, and sum of the neutrino masses. The SO scientific goals require coordination and control of the hardware distributed among the four telescopes on site. To meet this need, we have designed and built an open-sourced platform for distributed system management, called the Observatory Control System (ocs). This control system interfaces with all subsystems including the…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSuperconducting and THz Device Technology · Astronomy and Astrophysical Research · Radio Astronomy Observations and Technology
