The CMS control room is the heart of CMS operations, located at LHC point 5 in Cessy, France. Although the space was originally conceived to house the computing farm for the CMS Data Acquisition/High Level Trigger system, its intent was modified just before Run-1 to contain the control room and performed admirably. LS1 provided the opportunity to bring together a taskforce to evaluate the control room to see how it could be improved for Run-2.

A few items were identified as critical to improve operations, including the physically disjoint positions of the shift crew, the lack of “leadership location” for the Shift Leader, the inability to know at a glance the running state of CMS and the LHC from anywhere in the room, and the large number of visitors (estimated to be ~30k/year) which could impede CMS operations. After several discussions involving both technical and operations teams, a set of changes were proposed to address these issues and are slated to take place during the cooling maintenance in May 2014.

The first change moves the position of the Shift Leader from the corner desk to the central table, physically putting the Shift Leader in a leadership position and explicitly linking the left section of the shift crew with the right section of the shift crew. The second change is to modify the coffee area (just to the left of this picture) to make it a visitor viewing gallery, so that visitors will then be instructed to pass quickly through the control room on their way underground. The figure shows the path and the new position of the Shift Leader. Not visible in the figure, the third change involves the workstations which are at end-of-life and are to be replaced with a 2x2 configuration of 27" widescreens (2560x1440 pixels each). All workstations in the room will have the same configuration to ease maintenance and maximize flexibility, so if a workstation fails, a shifter can simply log in to another workstation and have the same look and feel, an essential feeling for smooth operations. Finally, new display screens will be mounted at several vantage points in the room to show the 3 essential status screens of the DCS, DAQ, and LHC. For more details on the changes, please see https://indico.cern.ch/event/307345/.