Undergraduate Research at Jefferson Lab

LabVIEW Software Based Program to Minimize Data File Size of the Slow Controls System (SCS) of the Silicon Vertex Tracker (SVT)

Student: Zulqarnain M Jamal

School: Georgia Institute of Technology

Mentored By: Amrit Yegneswaran

SVT is a detector, made of silicon modules. It tracks charged particles and helps to determine interaction vertices. SCS controls and monitors currents and voltages, and monitors temperatures and humidity. SCS produces large data files. Smart Logger, a LabVIEW program, has been developed in to minimize data file size. Smart Logger discards data-sets if any the variables' value is zero for less than 4 consecutive events, since these zeros occur due to read back error. Remaining data-sets are subjected to a scan to verify whether new data-sets values differ from the preceding data-sets values by n *σ, here n is an integer selected based on the required precision and σ is the standard deviations computed from the first 1000 data-sets. If data-sets pass the scan, they are as a text file. If data-sets fail the scan, then SCS records every 21st data-sets. The Smart Logger reduces file size by about 95%.