Computer Technology

• The ICT OPS section provides the basic infrastructure for ICT services. This includes standard office automation services such as email, computer networks, telephones, workstation management, and printers.
• The ICT department strives for a high degree of digital sovereignty to limit dependence on external parties and thereby maintain the long-term stability of its own service provision. This applies to both office applications and scientific systems.
• Research in the field of particle physics requires large-scale computing and storage facilities, with thousands of computing cores and many petabytes of storage provided in Nikhef’s own data centre.
• Under the direction of the Physics Data Processing (PDP) group, the CT department provides the technical expertise for the development and management of these facilities for grid and cloud computing. In addition, the group also develops software that enables scientists worldwide to securely use distributed computer systems. More information about these activities can be found on the PDP group’s page.
• The various departments within Nikhef each have their own requirements and preferences regarding the ICT infrastructure. This leads to a wide variety of systems (Windows, Linux, and Apple) and demands a high degree of flexibility from ICT management.

• A group of approximately nine employees contributes to the support of experiments on a project basis. The CT-PO department is called upon during the development of a (sub)detector for an experiment. CT-PO is also frequently involved during the operational phase. In the latter case, the infrastructure, hardware, and selected technologies of the experiment—often located abroad—must be taken into account. Consider, for example, the control systems of CERN, with which the CT-PO must comply.
• The CT-PO’s activities focus primarily on two subfields: first, the detector control system (DCS), whose task is to monitor the detector and bring it into a safe state to store the measurement data. The latter is also the second subfield and is called the data acquisition system (DAQ).
• The CT-PO is involved in most of the experiments in which Nikhef participates: specifically the particle physics experiments ATLAS and LHCb and the astroparticle physics experiments KM3NeT, Virgo, and XENON1T. Furthermore, CT-PO is involved in numerous R&D activities in the field of tracking chips (e.g., Timepix) and solid-state detectors.
• CT-PO also provides technical support to the Gravitational Waves research group for the development of the Finesse software used to simulate the optical systems in laser interferometers.
• The CT-PO department collaborates extensively with Nikhef’s Electronics Department (ET). Broadly speaking, they build the hardware, after which CT-PO integrates it into a larger system. Embedded systems play a key role in this process. Windows systems, although still supported, are increasingly being replaced by Linux-based systems. Key programming languages for CT-PO are C/C++ and Python. Furthermore, CT-PO has extensive knowledge of networks, databases, version control systems (Git), and CERN’s SCADA system (WinCC), the de facto standard for the DCS of the LHC experiments.

The Computer Technology department builds and maintains the digital infrastructure that Nikhef’s researchers rely on every day: from project support for experiments to the networks that connect Nikhef’s researchers with colleagues and facilities around the world. This must be done in a reliable and secure manner.

Physicists pose the scientific questions; the Computer Technology team helps build the tools to answer them.