First experiences with the ATLAS pixel detector control system at the combined test beam 2004

Detector control systems (DCS) include the readout, control and supervision of hardware devices as well as the monitoring of external systems like cooling system and the processing of control data. The implementation of such a system in the final experiment also has to provide the communication with the trigger and data acquisition system (TDAQ). In addition, conditions data which describe the status of the pixel detector modules and their environment must be logged and stored in a common LHC wide database system. At the combined test beam all ATLAS subdetectors were operated together for the first time over a longer period. To ensure the functionality of the pixel detector, a control system was set up. We describe the architecture chosen for the pixel DCS, the interfaces to hardware devices, the interfaces to the users and the performance of our system. The embedding of the DCS in the common infrastructure of the combined test beam and also its communication with surrounding systems will be discussed in some detail. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.