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.