Real Time Conf. vs. ICALEPCS

Stefan Ritt – Paul Scherrer Institute, Switzerland

The issue

• Concerns have been expressed repeatedly that the Real Time Conference (RTC) could be affected severely by ICALPCS

• ICALEPCS is currently technically co-sponsored by CANPS, but visibility/integration of IEEE is poor

• Do not follow NPSS abstract selection rule (no papers rejected, Jacow based un-reviewed publications)

• Ideas:

• Shift continents to avoid overlap

• Invest money ($50 k) to invite expensive guest speakers,

more awards, no fee for controls talks, etc.

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RTC attendance

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Reasons for stable attendance:•Attract new communities (Fusion, Medical, Astrophysics, …)•Active and supportive committee (~40 people)•Adapt short courses to cutting edge technologies (e.g. GPU programming)

Merging RTC & ICALEPCS ?

• In our opinion (Patrick le Dû, Christian Bohm, SR) not a good idea because:

• RTC topics only have a small overlap with ICALPCS and are mostly complementary

• “ICALEPCS is about machine control, in HEP and fusion the machine is the experiment and controls merge with DAQ” (P. Clout)

• RTC control & monitoring spans a much wider area: Control of computing clusters, satellite monitoring, pixel detectors, …

• Overlap mainly in hardware technologies (~10%)

• “Signature feature” of RTC is multi-disciplinary

• Real time applications: Particle Physics, Nuclear Physics, Astrophysics, Space instrumentation, Medical Physics, Nuclear Power instrumentation, Security and Safety

• The idea is people are “forced” to listen to talks of other communities to discover possible synergies

• This works even for posters through the mini-oral presentations

• This only works if we keep all-plenary presentations (like NSS/MIC joint sessions)

• Increase in RTC attendance >300 or merging with ICALEPCS would kill this feature

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Almost none of them use EPICS for example

Program overlap?

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RTC 2010 RTC 2009

ICALEPCS 2011

Program comparison

ICALEPCS•Quality assurance

•Project management

•Integration of industrial devices

•Embedded and realtime software

•Distributed computing

•Process control and feedback

•Data and information management

•Upgrade of control systems

•Software technology evolution

•Hardware

•Security and safety

•Infrastructure management and diagnostics

•Operational tools and operators' view

RTC•Realtime system architectures

•Intelligent signal processing

•Programmable devices

•Fast data transfer links and networks

•Trigger systems

•Data acquisition

•Processing farms

•Control, monitoring, and test systems

•Upgrades

•Emerging realtime technologies

•New standards

•Realtime safety and security

•Feedback on experiences

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Financial support for RTC

• Use NPSS money to invite keynote speakers, awards, student grants etc.

• RTC is already at upper limit of registration fee ($500-$700) to cover basic things

• My personal opinion: this would be unfair towards other Technical Activities• Why should CANPS be “special” (except its size maybe)

• If we start supporting CANPS now, what will happen with other conferences if they see a attendance degradation

• Will money really help to attract more people? Does anybody know of anybody coming to a conference just because of a big shot keynote speaker?

• If we try to attract more controls people (reduced fee) and ICALEPCS decides to do the same, both sides invest money and the net result is zero. We should seek complementarity rather than competition.

• If AdCom thinks differently, I have however no problem in accepting support

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Interleaving continents

• RTC 2010: Portugal

• ICALEPCS 2011: France

• RTC 2012: Berkeley

• ICALEPCS 2013: San Francisco

• RTC 2014: Japan ← hard to change

• ICALEPCS 2015: Australia

• RTC 2016: Italy ?

• ICALEPCS 2017: China ?

• RTC 2018: US ?

• ICALEPCS 2019: ???

RTC shifted in 2010 to break odd-year cycle with a big effort, nowICALEPCS should cooperate to swap continents

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should be coordinated

ICALEPCS & NPSS

• Tighter integration of ICALEPCS into IEEE might be beneficial

• Introduce and push industrial automation into accelerator control

• Publish in IEEE according to NPSS rules

• Merge into CANPS ?• Keep current TC: Probably unacceptable to ICALEPCS

• New TC from ICALEPCS: I have no problem in stepping back, given that the “spirit” of RTC is ensured

• Have two TCs ?

• Start a new Technical Activity with dedicated TC ?• Does the ICALEPCS community really want this ? Do they fit administrative wise ? The do not seem to be very positive towards IEEE

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My conclusions

• We should strengthen the personal link towards ICALEPCS via AdCom members (Peter, Patrick, …)

• We have tomorrow two organizers of ICALEPCS 2013 with us, will try to socialize

• Coordinate continents for conferences to minimize geographical overlap

• At the moment it looks hard to me to integrate ICALEPCS into NPSS

• We have to keep the character of RTC (multi-disciplinarity, mini-orals, continuously renewing ourselves with new hot topics) to serve our Real-Time community

• We need an update of the CANPS definition and its award, come back later to that point

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