A Modernized Architecture for the Post Mortem System at CERN

Abstract

The control system of the accelerators at CERN stores and analyzes more than 200 million dumps of high resolution data recordings every year in the Post Mortem (PM) system. A continuous increase in the complexity of the Large Hadron Collider’s (LHC) systems and the desire to collect more accurate data requires continuous improvement of the PM system. Recently, the PM system has been modernized ahead of the third operational Run of the LHC. The upgraded system implements well known data engineering principles such as horizontal scaling, stateless services and readiness for extensions. This paper recalls the purpose of the PM service and its current use cases. It presents its modernized architecture, reviews the current performance and limitations of the system, and draws perspectives for the next steps in its evolution