Big science labs are at the forefront of scientific and technological development and knowledge
We interview Miroslav Pavleski, VP Scientific Domain at Cosylab, who shares his insights on the evolutions in software projects in science, about technology trends such as microTCA and looks into the future, what role labs can take in a fast moving technological world.
Control Sheet: In your opinion, where is the market for control systems for large scientific projects heading? Is the nature of projects in Big Science changing and if so, in which direction and what are the consequences?
Miki: The projects of our customers in Big Science are always highly technical and complex. And at the same time we’re seeing an exponential growth in innovation in all technology fields, world-wide. That means there are developments in (seemingly) unrelated fields that, if applied, can bring great value for the projects, in various ways: performance, efficiency, reliability. The things I am referring to are things like Industry 4.0, Machine learning, IoT, LPWAN and indeed a lot of innovation in the software engineering process and tools used. The more one is aware of all the developments, the better the solution you can pull together. It is quite challenging though to do that, to swipe through the entire field. At Cosylab my goal is therefore to ensure and to stimulate a culture of continuous learning and innovation. A big part of this is sharing the knowledge an individual engineer acquires through regular technical lectures, technical articles and to raise awareness of interesting new methodologies and technologies. That makes our engineers more versatile to apply the best solutions on the projects they work on.
We are also really well positioned to have this kind of wide sweep because we are involved with a lot of heterogeneous projects.
To wrap up: in order to keep up with the global innovation pace we have built a culture of continuous learning and we try to maximize the sharing of knowledge between the different projects we work on.
Control Sheet: So we act as a kind of filter in this stream of novelties?
Miki: Yes, kind of. Since we cover a wide field: accelerators, astronomy, fusion energy, particle therapy, new energy (e.g. solar) and also industry, we have an opportunity to encounter and work on different problems. It is important to share the knowledge and apply it across all the projects.
Control Sheet: Is the work, the kind of projects, Cosylab is doing also changing?
Miki: There’s a kind of flywheel effect: we do bigger projects, allowing us to grow, making us capable of taking on bigger projects, etc. So yes, the main change is we can take up more system responsibility for larger project. With this comes know-how and internal processes to accommodate this. To put some numbers to it: we can take system responsibility for say a 30 FTE project and create the organizational structure, and provide the right experts and resources to execute them. Keep in mind that 30 engineers is around the size of a Control group for a medium to large project.
Control Sheet: MicroTCA has been “talk of the town”. Can you tell us, what is the value, benefits, potential for big science?
Miki: mTCA was conceived to have a wider audience in the beginning, but what happened in practice is that it is thriving in the field of big physics. It is the future proof form factor to choose for new development, wherever fast acquisition and/or control is needed. For accelerators, we see its use in places where custom beam diagnostics is being developed or for example in LLRF systems.
The keyword here is “custom”. What we already have at Cosylab is the right building blocks ready to offer the labs as a solution they can build their custom system on top of. We have this since we did several such successful custom systems and we identified that large part of those is common. We use specific technology that enables this reuse, such as Nominal Device Support (NDS3).
The point of customization would be for example the specific FPGA signal processing and also on the host level, the specific interface to the distributed control system such as EPICS/Tango/FESA and the HMIs. All the rest can be integrated by us.
Control Sheet: How does Big science with its accelerators, large telescope, alternative energy projects affect society, besides fundamental research? Will they save the world?
Miki: This is my personal opinion: our customers, accelerators and other big science labs are at the forefront of scientific and technological development and knowledge. Doing both fundamental and applied research they naturally have the horizon further into the future, far beyond, to be blunt, quarter-to-quarter targets that businesses have. So we need both: shorter term focused, highly competitive and efficient business and markets and, also very important, longer term research oriented scientific projects. Because, in practice our customers are the ones pioneering the new knowledge that will help humanity with the growing challenges we will be facing. I’d rather see more of such projects then less, for our future’s sake!
Control Sheet: Last question, tell us a bit about your background: how long have you been with Cosylab? And tell us a bit about what you did before.
Miroslav: In the New Year it will be 6 years. Just before I joined I worked in an e-business company that made products for paperless businesses: digital signature solutions, electronic archives, electronic invoicing etc. I was also involved part-time in European funded research projects in the field, for example we developed a generic system for smart contracts.
During my student years and right after graduation, I was an independent consultant, working on and managing various engineering projects in different fields: from custom industrial automation product development, bare-bones programming of DSPs and microcontrollers, high level programming, accounting software, penetration testing and data recovery … a broad technical range.
As a background I have a Masters equivalent from the Electrical Engineering Faculty in Skopje, Macedonia. The study program was computer engineering, automation and informatics: a wide ranging theoretical foundation of which I’m grateful. Looking back, I’m happy that luck brought me to Cosylab, because I could apply the whole breadth of that program: we do control systems, hence automation, it also involves a lot of software and electronics … the whole shebang.
This interview is republished from Cosylab’s Control Sheet newsletter №33, December 2017
