The Simons Observatory: Deployment and current configuration of the Observatory Control System for SAT-MF1 and data access software systems

TL;DR

This paper describes the deployment, current configuration, and software systems of the Simons Observatory, focusing on data acquisition and access for its telescopes, highlighting performance challenges and improvements.

Contribution

It presents the first deployment details of the SO's data acquisition and access software systems, including insights into performance limitations and software enhancements.

Findings

Performance limitations impacted data loading and quality investigations.

Software improvements were implemented to enhance site compatibility and performance.

The deployment process provided valuable insights for future observatory software configurations.

Abstract

The Simons Observatory (SO) is a Cosmic Microwave Background experiment located in the Atacama Desert in Chile. SO consists of three small aperture telescopes (SATs) and one large aperture telescope (LAT) with a total of 60,000 detectors in six frequency bands. As an observatory, SO encompasses hundreds of hardware components simultaneously running at different readout rates, all separate from its 60,000 detectors on-sky and their metadata. We provide an overview of commissioning SO's data acquisition software system for SAT-MF1, the first SAT deployed to the Atacama site. Additionally, we share insights from deploying data access software for all four telescopes, detailing how performance limitations affected data loading and quality investigations, which led to site-compatible software improvements.