Proceedings of IBIC2012, Tsukuba, Japan

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BEAM INSTRUMENTATION GLOBAL NETWORK [BIGNET]:
A COMMON WEB PORTAL FOR BEAM INSTRUMENTALISTS

Abstract
This document will present an initiative launchedduring the International Particle Accelerator Conference(IPAC11) to define and produce a common web portal for
Beam Instrumentation, with the aim of allowing any beam
instrumentalist to easily and efficiently:
find the laboratories with machines using beams ofsimilar characteristics (particle type, total beam
intensity, bunch intensity, frequency, energy)
find the person who is working there on the beamobservable concerned (i.e. beam position, loss,intensity, transverse or longitudinal profile, tune)
and how to contact him/hercreate discussion forums with the right audience on
hot beam instrumentation topics or issues
advertise topical events and workshop
provide links towards documents describing
system designs and performance assessments...
This document will cover the status and prospects ofthe project with the aim to invite and welcome newlaboratories to join the adventure.

INTRODUCTION
On regular occasions over the past years, user
requirements have put increasing demands on the CERN
accelerator complex beam instrumentation.
These requests are most of the time easy to summarize
as “improve the performance” of a given instrument and“quantify precisely the uncertainty of its measurements”.
Implementation on the other hand often turns out to bea difficult and challenging task and it was quickly realized
during this process that there was no easy way to shareissues, questions and progress with people probably
facing similar kinds of problems in other laboratories.
The opportunity of the 2nd International Particle
Accelerator Conference (IPAC11) was therefore taken to
discuss the subject with beam instrumentation colleagues
from other institutes and it was agreed that something
useful could be done in this domain. That is how BIGNet(for Beam Instrumentation Global Network) started.

INITIAL OBJECTIVES AND PLANS
The aim of the project was to build ‘something’ thatwould allow any beam instrumentalist to:
Easily find the laboratories with accelerators
producing beams with similar characteristics(particle type, total beam intensity, bunch intensity,energy…)
Easily find the experts working at these institutes
on the different beam observables (i.e. beam

position, loss, intensity, transverse or longitudinal
profile, tune…) and how to contact them.
Launch (or participate in) discussion forums withthe right people
Advertise events such as workshops on specificinstrumentation
technologies
andbeam
instrumentation related conferences.
Provide links towards documents describing
system designs and performance assessments
Find job offers in the field...
The obvious solution was to develop a web site
providing all the relevant features to host and maintainthis data (i.e. accelerator and beam parameters, expertlists…), a calendar and discussion forums.
Each participating laboratory would nominate a local
administrator to maintain the information (i.e. machineand beam parameters, instrument and expert lists, localevents…) related to their laboratory.
Once this was in place, any beam instrumentation
expert could then use the site content and create orparticipate to discussions
The plan was to develop and assess a prototype of thisweb site during 2012 in collaboration with somevolunteer local administrators in other laboratories and topropose it to a wider audience during IBIC2012. That iswhere we stand today.

CURRENT STATUS OF BIGNET
The current implementation of the BIGNet web site(see https://espace.cern.ch/info-bi-portal/default.aspx) isbased on the SharePoint [1] infrastructure available at
CERN. This option was taken for the following reasons:The SharePoint infrastructure is extremely flexible
and embeds all the functionalities to handle
discussions, alerts, access rights etc.
It allows the export of data into standard formats
such as Excel tables, which would make migration
to another platform possible if eventually required.
It is widely used at CERN so an efficient support
from the CERN-IT department can be relied upon.
This choice allowed the rapid development of a
prototype web site. Its current entry page is shown in Fig.
1. Despite the good flexibility and functionality of thisarchitecture, the look and feel can in some cases remainclumsy. If this is felt to be too penalizing for the final
implementation other options could be considered, but as
it is this web site already allows assessment of theusefulness of such a tool and permits the type of services
and interfaces it should provide to be defined.
The following chapters will give details on the content
and functionalities of the main subpages of this site.

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1c 2012 by the respective authors — cc Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC BY 3.0)
Copyright ○J-J. Gras, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland

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Proceedings of IBIC2012, Tsukuba, Japan

Figure 1: BIGNet entry page at https://espace.cern.ch/info-bi-portal/default.aspx. It provides a short introduction to thesite and its contents with an overview of upcoming events and latest discussion forums, as well as providing access to
its different subpages.

This page presents the list of laboratories participating
to the BIGNet with the name of their local administrators.

specification,technicaldescription,performanceassessment…), the beam observable and type of
instrument it covers, which accelerator it concerns andfinally the link towards the document itself.

Accelerators Overview

Related Events

This page proposes two different views to describe therelevant machine and beam parameters of the different
accelerators found at the participating laboratories. One
view gives the details of the selected accelerator while theother regroups all accelerators in a single table with somefiltering criteria, such as accelerator type or particle type.

Major conferences such as IBIC are well publicisedthroughout the community but smaller workshops withmore focussed scopes often go unnoticed. Even if people
are not able to attend these meetings, they could beinterested by the proceedings or possible participation via
video conferencing. This part of the web site will allow
the organizers to advertise such events and possibly reacha wider audience. The ‘Alert’ facility of the web site will
do the rest with every member of the BIGNet
automatically notified by email that a new event record
has been added to the site with the corresponding details.

c 2012 by the respective authors — cc Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC BY 3.0)
Copyright ○Laboratories

Beam Instrumentalists
This page regroups the information on the beam
instrumentation specialists at the the participating
laboratories. In addition to their home laboratories andemail contact, it also provides their main domains ofcompetence (beam physics, digital electronics,…), thetypes of instruments they use (current transformer,inductive pick-ups…) and on which observables(intensity, losses, position…) they concentrate. The
filtering facilities available on this page allow for a fastand easy way of producing a list of experts working in a
specific domain.

Documentation
Papers and notes describing system designs andperformance assessments are scattered in many different
places and it is often difficult to find them unless they are
known to exist, or there is some knowledge of the storage
location, author or part of the title. The purpose of thislibrary is not to store a copy of these documents but justrefer to them with some attached attributes that will ease
their access by relevant filtering. Each record in thislibrary will contain a title, abstract and list of authors,with in addition the type of document (functionalDiscussions
An important aim of this site is to also allow BIGNet
members to launch technical discussions on issues orachievements with other experts in the field around theworld. The Discussion Forums are available for that.
Every member will be able to launch a discussion on abeam instrumentation related topic or participate to any
existing discussion via the BIGNet website. Activity on
the discussion forums is also monitored via ‘Alerts’.
Every member of the network will receive an email once
per day gathering all the new discussions launched andany new input on existing discussions. A quick look at theheaders will allow users to see if some topics could be ofinterest to them. One may fear that eventually this daily
mail becomes too crowded to be useable but this would
also mean that the forum is successful. Options could thenbe put in place to allow users to filter topics of interest.
Two main discussion forums are currently in place. The
first one is dedicated to discussions on beamISBN 978-3-95450-119-9
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Proceedings of IBIC2012, Tsukuba, JapanKEY ROLES WITHIN THE PROJECT
It is now important to define the role of the different
users of this site, especially the local administrators whowill be essential for the success of this project.
The following subchapters will describe these different
roles as they are imagined today.

General Public
The general public, i.e. users who cannot (or did not)sign in, will be able to consult the list of the participating
laboratories, the accelerators views and the event pages
but will not have access to the details on beam
instrumentalists or the discussion pages.

Network Members
Network members will appear in the Beam
Instrumentalists page and will have access (once signedin) to all the information on the site. In addition, they
have the right to launch a discussion or participate to an
existing one. The site will be configured in such a waythat they will receive up to 2 emails per day gathering theactivity on the site, one for new events added in thecalendar and one for new items in the discussion forum
on beam instrumentation. If there is no activity, no mailwill be sent.

Network Local Administrators
BIGNet local administrators are the most importantpiece of the puzzle. They take the responsibility ofentering and keeping up-to-date the data related to theirhome institute. In particular, they are responsible for:
1. Adding the accelerators hosted in their laboratory
to the Accelerators Overview page.
2. Registering their beam instrumentalists onto thesite and training them on how to use it.
3. Adding the beam instrumentation related events
that may be organized by their laboratory.
4. Promoting the network inside their team.
5. Contribute actively to the upgrade of the tool withfeedback on the functionality.
The corresponding workload may look heavy at firstglance but experience shows that it can be madereasonable and certainly worth the effort. Gathering theinitial set of data, especially machine parameters, could
be a non-negligible (but always useful) task but once done
the maintenance effort to keep this data up-to-date should
be limited. Machine parameters and experts list do notchange so often with a yearly update considered enoughfor the moment. Overall, it looks to be a good investment
for any laboratory with respect to the potential returnfrom the wider community.

Steering Board Members
The most motivated local administrators will bewelcome to join the BIGNet steering board that will be incharge of discussing this feedback and deciding on whatshould be implemented, when and how. The organisationand frequency of these discussions is still to be defined
but the current idea is to meet via a video conference
every quarter with a yearly ‘physical’ meeting during
IBIC.

Web Site Administrators
Finally, web site administrators will be in charge of
implementing agreed structural/behavioural changes atleast for the current version. It is worth noting that any
local administrator could become a site administrator witha fairly basic training on SharePoint.

THE NEXT STEPS
Now that this tool is in our hands, the next steps willbe:to invite other laboratories to join the adventure
and motivate future local administrators. IBIC2012
being the ideal opportunity for that.
to populate the Accelerators Overview and Beam
Instrumentalist lists.
to launch a few discussion forums and advertise
upcoming events
to put the Steering Board in place and react toexperience and feedback

CONCLUSIONSThe current implementation of the BIGNet prototype
proposes most of the features that were targeted at thestart of the project. Even if it may not be perfect in termsof look and feel, it is sufficiently user-friendly to startworking efficiently and demonstrate the usefulness of thisinitiative. It is now up to the community as a whole tomake it grow and it is hoped that many new laboratories
will join the adventure by clicking the ‘How to join theBIGNet’linkon
https://espace.cern.ch/info-biportal/default.aspx.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I would like to acknowledge all the people who
contributed to the lively discussions to define this projectand in particular the early volunteer local administrators,
namely A. Alexander (ORNL), J-C. Denard (SOLEIL),
A. Jansson (ESS), M. Minty (BNL), T. Mitsuhashi(KEK), F. Perez (CELLS-ALBA), G. Rehm(DIAMOND), M.
Schwickert (GSI), H. Tanaka(Spring8), C. Welsch (University of Liverpool) and K.
Wittenburg (DESY).

REFERENCES[1] Microsoft
SharePointbyMicrosoft;
http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/pages/default.aspx

ISBN 978-3-95450-119-9
Miscellaneous and others

3c 2012 by the respective authors — cc Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC BY 3.0)
Copyright ○instrumentation. It could be split further (by observablefor instance) once there is larger scale activity within thenetwork. The second focuses on discussions on theBIGNet functionality itself. This is the forum to use inthis early phase to discuss functionality and options or
propose extensions etc.

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