South Pole Telescope Software Systems: Control, Monitoring, and Data Acquisition
Abstract
We present the software system used to control and operate the South Pole Telescope. The South Pole Telescope is a 10-meter millimeter-wavelength telescope designed to measure anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) at arcminute angular resolution. In the austral summer of 2011/12, the SPT was equipped with a new polarization-sensitive camera, which consists of 1536 transition-edge sensor bolometers. The bolometers are read out using 36 independent digital frequency multiplexing (\dfmux) readout boards, each with its own embedded processors. These autonomous boards control and read out data from the focal plane with on-board software and firmware. An overall control software system running on a separate control computer controls the \dfmux boards, the cryostat and all other aspects of telescope operation. This control software collects and monitors data in real-time, and stores the data to disk for transfer to the United States for analysis.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1210.4966,
title = {South Pole Telescope Software Systems: Control, Monitoring, and Data Acquisition},
author = {K. Story and E. Leitch and P. Ade and K. A. Aird and J. E. Austermann and J. A. Beall and D. Becker and A. N. Bender and B. A. Benson and L. E. Bleem and J. Britton and J. E. Carlstrom and C. L. Chang and H. C. Chiang and H-M. Cho and T. M. Crawford and A. T. Crites and A. Datesman and T. de Haan and M. A. Dobbs and W. Everett and A. Ewall-Wice and E. M. George and N. W. Halverson and N. Harrington and J. W. Henning and G. C. Hilton and W. L. Holzapfel and S. Hoover and N. Huang and J. Hubmayr and K. D. Irwin and M. Karfunkle and R. Keisler and J. Kennedy and A. T. Lee and D. Li and M. Lueker and D. P. Marrone and J. J. McMahon and J. Mehl and S. S. Meyer and J. Montgomery and T. E. Montroy and J. Nagy and T. Natoli and J. P. Nibarger and M. D. Niemack and V. Novosad and S. Padin and C. Pryke and C. L. Reichardt and J. E. Ruhl and B. R. Saliwanchik and J. T. Sayre and K. K. Schaffer and E. Shirokoff and G. Smecher and B. Stalder and C. Tucker and K. Vanderlinde and J. D. Vieira and G. Wang and R. Williamson and V. Yefremenko and K. W. Yoon and E. Young},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1210.4966},
year = {2012}
}