ILL - Central Computer Group
The staff
From 1983 to 1992, Denis Rimmer was the head of both the Central computer Group and the SAD ("Service d'Acquisition des Données")
For the Central Computer group itself:
Heads: (1971) Yvon Siret, (1982) Mathurin Le Sourne, (1996) Alain Barthélemy, (2007) Jean-François Perrin and (2020) Erwan Le Gall
The list below is for the period 1972-2008
Engineers: Christian de Polignac, Mathurin Le Sourne
Programmers: Odile Tillier, Eliane Douieb, Martine Espitallier, Didier Richard, Fabien Pinet, Brian Pater
Operators: Christian Rey (team leader), Etienne Métreau, Jean-Louis Lagier, Paul Rice, Susan Gleed, Steve Airey, Steve Evans, Pierre Hélin, (Max) Tan Trung Truong
Operators/programmers: Paul Rice, Christian Lacaille-Desse, Jean Foubert
Documentation
Until the advent of the internet there was little pressure within the Institut to provide documentation on the facilities. In 1975, when the first posts for staff scientists were introduced, Mossbauer insisted these would only be offered to scientists whose instruments had user documentation. There was hence an unequaled spate of production of internal technical reports describing use of instruments and software.
Calcul Scientific had produced the Central Computer Users Newsletter from 1974, edited by Christian de Polignac, which described hardware innovations and software, with issues about every two months. For the instruments, Lefèvre was assiduous in producing a technical note for each instrument he was involved with, describing hardware down to wiring harness schedules, together with the basic software needed to control acquisition. Though there were occasional technical reports on major investments, for example the Nicole replacement project, and the Unix conversion, these were somewhat exceptional.
In 1989, George Messoumian and Alain Filhol created MacFaceILL a newsletter for Macintosh users. In 1994 it was replaced by ILL Micro News for Macs and PCs users. The topics covered were hardware, software, operating system, office automation, development, etc.
During the long shutdown 1991-1995 and the implementation of the UNIX PLAN the ILL's first web server was introduced; this provided a basis for documentation easy to update, and, quite importantly, open to the outside users. The early site contained information from the Central Computer Group, but this was rapidly extended to other groups within the ILL, and the scientific groups quickly adopted the habit of documenting instruments and data treatment software. Early web pages can be found on the webarchive server, with the first snapshot dating from 1996.
The Central Computer Users' Committee
Under the chairmanship of Dennis Rimmer, the engineers of CS and representatives of each college met monthly to discuss operational problems and new developments. It served too in the preparation of tests for new systems, and was one of the few regular forums between the technical groups and scientists.
When Mathurin Le Sourne retired in 1996, Alain Barthelemy was placed in charge of all computing activities to be superseded by Jean-Francois Perrin. Software development in-house was primarily directed towards control of instruments; the ILL contributed financially towards joint projects like Mantid for treating TOF and SANS data. This placed the focus on external groups to provide the manpower for formally managed activities, but the proximity to new experiments was lost. The complexity of the packages demands issuing requests for updates which are then sequenced by the management team. In general there was a net reduction in the scientists interest in treating data themselves; there was no consensus in common usage of tools or techniques, which had been restricted to Fortran in earlier years. A number of Fortran programs were enhanced with Tk/Tcl graphical interfaces, providing a push-button graphical interactive command interface while retaining the well-proven calculation routines; this prolonged the lifetime of some fitting libraries from the 1980s to the present day.
The timeline
Approximate computer and component costs are available here.
Dates below are approximate.
| 1973 | Installation of rented DEC PDP KI-1070 with 256 kwords of 36 bit memory (equivalent to 1152 kilobytes) ; 10 teletype terminals ; 2x7 (later 9-) track ; 2x9-track tapes ; 2xDECtapes ; 4x40MB disk ; Calcomp pen plotter ; 2 GT40A display ; Fortran IV (.F4) |  (jpg - 67 Ki)Calcomp 563 pen plotter ©<www.pdp8online.com> |
| 1977 | Computer was acquired ; added memory 250 MW ; additional compatible disk Tektronix 4010 Graphics terminals (PLOT10) | |
| 1978 | Serial line data transfer for D17 Versatec raster electrostatic plotter |  (png - 1.29 Mi)Versatec electrostatic plotter ©<archive.org> |
| 1979 | Benson pen plotter Replacement Project started: IBM / CII-Honeywell BULL / ICL / Siemens / DEC |  (jpg - 117 Ki)Benson pen plotter 7580 ©<hpmuseum.net> |
| 1980 | LA36 and LA120 dot-matrix printing terminals Tektronix 4025 raster graphics terminals |  (png - 2.52 Mi)DECwriter II LAS36 terminal ©<columbia.edu> |
| 1981 | Dual operations DEC PDP-KI10 and PDP-KL1091S (more details here) Fortran77 (.F10) |  DECsystem10 ©<livingcomputers.org> |
| 1982 | Installation of the DEC10 KL1091S in new computer building ; 2 GB data disks VT100, PT100 terminals, Pericom Grafpak raster graphics DECnet, WAN-BITNET (bisync) EARN FRILL MICOM terminal switch ; terminals cabled throughout ILL | |
| 1984 | Apple Macintosh computers introduced starting with Macintosh 128 Apple ImageWriter, Apple LaserWriter (1st PostScript printer) Appletalk network |  (jpg - 399 Ki)Apple Macintosh Plus (1986) still working. Note the "enormous" 20 Mb external hard drive. ©2022 A.Filhol |
| 1986 | Acquisition of DEC VAX-8600 cluster with VAX11/751 and HSC controller X25 WAN JANET ; EARN FRILL51 on VMS Pericom Monterey raster graphics terminals Ethernet LAN DEC LN03R PostScript laser printers for graphics |  (jpg - 104 Ki)VAX 11/751 a rugged 750 model © DFWCUG Historical CPU Preservation Society |
| 1987 | Upgrade (with ESRF) of VAX 8650 Network tools DEC DFS, DQS, distributed file services/queueing DEC-Datatrieve for experimental database Thin wire ethernet (10BASE2) LAN cabled to offices |  Thin ethernet (10base2) |
| 1988 | Evans & Sutherland PS340 Graphics for Biology (FRODO…) |  (png - 371 Ki)Evans & Sutherland PS300 (analog vector drawing in color and depth cueing) ©<archive.org> |
| 1989 | VAX-8700 cluster with VAX-8650 and VAX11/751 DECsystem10 (or PDP10) retired |  (png - 432 Ki)DEC VAX 8700 ©<imsvintagephotos.com> |
| 1990 | DEC-Ultrix Unix workstation PGPLOT graphics library | |
| 1991 | Long shutdown DEC-AXP3000 processor (64-bit Alpha AXP architecture) added to VMS-Cluster (Romeo) |
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| 1992 | Unix Conversion | |
| 1994 | Silicon Graphics server Group HP/Silicon Graphics workstations DEC-AXP3500 processor (Alfa) added to VMS-Cluster VAX8650 and VAX8700 withdrawn RJ45 cabling of institut with switching routers |  (jpg - 69 Ki)SGI Indy Presenter. With a weight of 14 kg, it was more "transportable" than portable! ©<aconit.org> |
| 1997 | Two DEC/Compaq-DS20E AXP twin processor unix cluster, matching a single computer-node of the CISI massive computing cluster |
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| 1999 | A rack of 8 Hewlett-Packard HP-UX twin Xeon processor desktops with Alinka management software for multi-processor computing | |
| 2000 | SUN NFS fileserver introduced | |
| 2006 | Fujitsu-Siemens Opteron 8 biprocessor blade cluster (Linux) (later expanded with infiniband interconnect) |  (jpg - 79 Ki)Fujitsu-Siemens Primergy BX630 ©<docplayer.org> |
| 2007 | Linux Xeon blades (SPARCserver 1000) used for central fileserver |
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