First few weeks of my project at CERN

Dami Tariuwa

Project Title: Application Logfile Analysis and Reporting for the CERN Accelerator Control System

Who am I?
Hi there! I recently joined the BE-CSS (Controls Software & Services Group) section at CERN where I am doing some data analysis and reporting for the CERN Accelerator Control System under Dr. Vito Baggiolini.

My Project
I am working within the BE-CSS Communication, Processing & Archival team. This is a team of 15 software engineers who develop and operate a part of the controls system software of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the other CERN accelerators. They are responsible for numerous software systems used by accelerator physicists, accelerator operators, technicians, and equipment experts, who contribute to the successful operation of the accelerators and production of the particle beam used in the physics experiments at CERN.

ATLAS Control Centre

​My project aims to gain a better insight on how users utilise these software systems. I will be analysing requests to the Application Programming Interfaces and by the end of the project, I hope to answer the following questions:

• Who uses which APIs, and how frequently?
• Which API calls are not used at all and could be removed?
• Which APIs are called unsuccessfully and cause errors visible to the users?
• What kind of errors happen?

To achieve this, I will be extracting, cleaning and analysing relevant information from the OpenSearch database that contains CERN logfiles.

My Experience so Far
It has been a week since I started my project and it’s been joyful.
I have a more profound appreciation for data and the different ways it can be transformed & used to provide insights that can improve software systems. I have also enjoyed learning about data cleaning techniques and visualisation.
It has been pleasant to meet members of the group and everyone has been friendly and kind. I have met people from a variety of nationalities and there’s a beauty in seeing people from different cultures work together to achieve the common goal of making the world better by supporting scientific curiosity. Going to lunch together and coffee catch-ups are a great delight. There is also Friday Cake, need I say more!

I have already taken part in some of the wider opportunities on offer, including attending a tour of Synchro-Cyclotron (CERN’s oldest accelerator) and ATLAS (contributed to the discovery Higgs Boson wow) and attending the Women In Technology lunch.
 
I am glad to be here, it’s truly one of coolest places on earth**
 
 **And not just because of the cryogenic systems (special shout out to Vito for that pun)

Synchrocyclotron