Massachusetts Institute of Technology CUORE

Technologies Used

Description

The Cambridge based Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) asked Parthenon Software to build new features, algorithm changes, and performance improvements on the analytics and data management tool that supports their physicists at the Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE).

CUORE is an underground particle physics facility operated by an international collaboration of institutions including MIT, Berkeley, Yale, UCLA, Lawrence Livermore National Labs, US Department of Energy, and the National Science foundation. While its primary goal is searching for neutrinoless double beta decay and dark matter, CUORE has the distinction of being the “coldest cubic meter in the known universe” by cooling a one cubic meter copper vessel to near absolute zero, −273.144 °C (0.006 K) for 15 days.

The analytics tool is written in Python 3 and AngularJS. It uses Highcharts and custom visualizations for charting, and MongoDB for the database. Millions of time-series data points are collected by a number of sensors and input into MongoDB. This data is then sampled by the software tool via an adaptive algorithm to produce graphs allowing user exploration of the data using the HighCharts graphing framework and several custom data visualizations. The software alerts users of unusual data detected by the sensors, in addition to producing real-time charts for the most important indicators.