  The Simons Observatory (SO) is an upcoming polarized cosmic microwave
background (CMB) survey experiment with three small-aperture telescopes and one
large-aperture telescope that will observe from the Atacama Desert in Chile. In
total, SO will field over 60,000 transition-edge sensor (TES) bolometers in six
spectral bands centered between 27 and 280 GHz to achieve the sensitivity
necessary to measure or constrain numerous cosmological parameters, including
the tensor-to-scalar ratio, effective number of relativistic species, and sum
of the neutrino masses. The SO scientific goals require coordination and
control of the hardware distributed among the four telescopes on site. To meet
this need, we have designed and built an open-sourced platform for distributed
system management, called the Observatory Control System (ocs). This control
system interfaces with all subsystems including the telescope control units,
the microwave multiplexing readout electronics, and the cryogenic thermometry.
We have also developed a system for live monitoring of housekeeping data and
alerting, both of which are critical for remote observation. We take advantage
of existing open source projects, such as crossbar for RPC and PubSub, twisted
for asynchronous events, grafana for online remote monitoring, and docker for
containerization. We provide an overview of the SO software and computer
infrastructure, including the integration of SO-developed code with open source
resources and lessons learned while testing at SO labs developing hardware
systems as we prepare for deployment.
