CRISTAL (Cooperative Repositories & Information System for Tracking Assembly Lifecycle) is a Java application written to manage the gathering of production data during the ongoing construction of the Electromagnetic Calorimeter of the Compact Muon Solenoid, which is part of the new Large Hadron Collider, at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN), which invented web.
The final product of a long and tortuous project; CRISTAL is a description-driven system, which means that the data structures and workflow-driven behaviour of the business objects in the system can be reconfigured at any time. It also supports versioning of these definitions, so the old ones will still work when you do. Collected data may be mirrored into several different databases concurrently, including your favourite RDBMS, and so can be queried for management summary data.
The current version (Cristal 2) has been in production since August 2003 in ECAL at CERN, and is also used for Preshower construction in CERN, Greece, Russia and Taiwan. The technology has also been adapted for use in industry by the start-up company Agilium.
Some technologies used for all of this are: XML, CORBA, OpenLDAP, Java, Xerces, BSF and Castor.
26th October 2006 - By the way, I never bothered releasing 2.2. We use it internally for developing workflows, but seeing as everyone's got everything they need for Opers in 2.1, we thought we'd save ourselves all that migration work. If it ain't broke etc...
15th September 2006 - I've added aggregation history browsing. It's cool.
7th July 2006 - The CERN Cristal databases have moved to an Oracle cluster. All clients should at some point reinstall with the latest version below, and replace their .clc file with a new one from me. The old clients will still work, but will not be able to connect to the db. They can still retrieve data through the server, but that will slow everyone down so we don't want that do we?
Cristal 2.2 has been finished for some time, but as the CERN centres are working just fine with 2.1 we decided not to bother migrating them. If you really want it, mail me.
13th May 2005 - Cristal 2.2 coming soon. Cristal 2.2 has an updated LDAP format to allow single LDAP queries of entity properties in the domain tree, support for distributed centres, workflows and bootstrapped data items for designing local objects and item descriptions, and lots more optimisations and improvements. It is not compatible with 2.1 data, and migration code will be supplied.
5th April 2005 - A minor update to the jars: It seems that some centres' usercode processes have been falling over themselves suddenly. Replace your jars with those below if your usercode and/or shipping services keep mysteriously stopping.
We are currently actively developing the 2.2 kernel, which includes full description editing capability, and a change to a new LDAP schema that enables property queries on the domain tree. Extensive migration code will be required, so we're not releasing it until it's ready.
These downloads are intended for current users of the software. If you do not have a centre to connect to, then they aren't really any use to you.
| File | Version | Description | Size | Last Modified |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cristal Installer | 2.2 (Kernel Build 2/Domain Build 1) | Server and Client installer | 27.8MB | 15/09/2006 |
| Cristal Installer | 2.1 (Kernel Build 22/Domain Build 28) | Server and Client installer (old) | 28.1MB | 26/10/2007 |
| Cristal Installer | 2.0 | Server and Client installer (old) | 20.7MB | 25/02/2004 |
| Cristal 1 Extractor | 1.0 | for dumping Cristal 1 products for import into Cristal 2 | 150KB | 12/08/2003 |
If you have recently installed Cristal 2, then simply copying the latest code into your /jars directory might be enough to bring you to the latest version. If in doubt though, use the installer. Or just ask.
You must use the installer to upgrade from 2.0 to 2.1
| File | Version | Description | Size | Last Modified |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cristal 2 Kernel Jar | 2.1 Build 22 | Core C2Kernel library (details) | 801KB | 14/11/2007 |
| Cristal 2 CERN Domain Jar | 2.1 Build 28 | CERN extensions & utilities (details) | 532KB | 14/11/2007 |
Besides the graphical and console query facilities that are included in the application package, we offer a web query service to our production data that provides data access also from outside CERN. However, this site is restricted to our users.
Last modified Wednesday 17th October 2009 by Andrew Branson PH/CMA