ICAT at CLF

The Central Laser Facility at is a world class laser facility operated by STFC and located at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. With the help of the eScience department, ICAT is currently being evaluated as a service orientated architecture replacement for their current monolithic data service on the Astra-Gemini laser system.

A number of concerns were initially expressed around the performance of the ICAT system against Astra-Gemini required data turn-around-time. Put simply, in order to perform another laser shot, CLF operators must know how the last shot behaved. CLF operators like to shoot their laser every twenty seconds.

Over the past couple of months, the eScience team have systematically improved the performance of ICAT for the CLF use-case. This has included a doubling of data ingest rate and gaining a better understanding of ICAT on a virtualised platform.

There remain some benchmarks still to be performed but the results are encouraging. In future posts, I will share these results and learnings with you - but if you can't wait till then, contact me by email at firstname.lastname[at]stfc.ac.uk.

Second ICAT Developer Workshop

The second ICAT Developer Workshop will be held on Tuesday 23rd & Wednesday 24th March at the ILL, Grenoble.

The intention is to run from lunchtime on Tuesday 23rd to lunchtime on Wednesday 24th (two half days)

The meeting is to be focused on how sites and projects are using, or plan to use, ICAT and any changes they need or would like to see to the ICAT API, schema and interfaces.

The detailed agenda will depend on exactly who is able to attend, so if you are interested please could you let me know as soon as possible.

We have reserved 10 rooms at the ILL for external attendees, so could you also indicate if you require a room.

If you are interested in attending please contact tom.griffin@stfc.ac.uk