WTF.. amidst mountain vistas | for comic relief: I'll Bite on this digital-Farrago of the IT kind; it's a lot like some other fanciful logic- wetdreams on a variety of topics. Too earnest to be a gag!?

A whole 1.2 MeV High School accelerator! + faith in the Boolean nature of all processes [surely must ==] The Self-operating Accelerator Complex. Many of youse IT folk do tend to believe this kind of crazy stuff, I notice. In Your (VB) Dreams [tm]
Decided CIEIO CTO-material there, Fotheringay!

Methinks the gentleman doth trivialize by at least a couple orders of magnitude - did I mention Pshaw! ??
(My Seconds have already called - but you won't notice the aftereffects until you sneeze .. or try to shake your head)

If by 'accelerators' you refer to the industrial 'automatic' toys intended for use by what pass for "medical techs" -- on orders from physics-illiterate MDs: yes, more and more ON/OFF switches.. and let VB calculate the dosage (and maybe or maybe not measure it in any believable way. Twice.) I have stories of MRI burns, etc. {shudder} I never let anyone radiate moi - who knows less than I do about W.T.F. [they think] they are doing.

The research accelerator may be as doomed as general engineering, scientific research trends in US indicate. Thus moot as to what you actually needed to know way-back, when we built these; but not moot as to what actually is required to do such things. New accelerators (pretty simple 'complexes' by comparison with the past) like LAMP at LBL - are clearly Logo- Corp - "develop at taxpayers' expense then Patent" scams under the guise of "physics research". (Via a cohort there)

Indications of unreality:

You may Un-check every one of the neat little categories in your
[surely a pukka Power Point Primer on Accelerators for CTOs... but sans the Bullets]

A 20ish MeV (mere electron) Linac is no schoolboy project (unless via a Lot of donated stuff and nontrivial expertise). The waveguides must be elecrodeposited OFHC copper. Then the aluminum spacers have to be eaten away in the usual chemical soup Very Carefully. Then the testing fun begins. Accomplishing decent Q and other impedance matches is neither amateur "electroplating" nor Radio Amateur-grade Smith plotting (with some tens of K$ of test equipment). Then there are the Klystrons, the hi-power RF and the lore. And the physics.

Ditto - comparing a 'simple' Cyclotron (say an Eimac 304TL triode for the oscillator) of Glyptal + sealing-wax days+ lore - did I mention Lore? to functioning systems: is bogus. Sure, they both somehow involve physics.. so does a paper glider.

If you move on to a real *particle* accelerating Linac [like, minimally: protons thence to maybe even U-ions] your simple thesis is merely laughable. Quadrupole magnets incorporated within varying length drift tubes, as must also accommodate high RF fields without arcing ==> 10 -E[7] Torr ==> nowadays ion-pumps + very pricey very-hi-RPM turbopumps. All this with oodles of LN for cold-traps, maybe He reefers etc. Sorry, Skip - your description reads via Disney out of Sesame Street. A McCoy 60 model airplane engine vs a RR Merlin in a Spitfire. $$$ vs peanuts.

A mere 500 KV Cockroft-Walton cascade, with gradient equalizing rings, polished to a fare-thee-well etc - is a sculpture and not some off-shelf 5V/12V-sorta switching supply.

And when you start thinking about *real* ion sources, then multiple injectors, a n-GeV synchrotron guide field - powered by a pair of ex-minesweeper motor-generators -- 16KV @ 8 KA (for Ex) -- and the timing of various subsystems, extraction systems, vac, refrig, massive and micro power regulators, radiation detectors, quadrupole focussing lenses all over ... yada

We won't even pause to discuss variants of synchrotrons / rings. Or what a Health Physicist needs to know re shielding, etc. etc. How does one 'automate' a one-off project? (if it IS - about anything new, ie 'research')

I stand by my original comparison from actual work done; the digital diddling is a small fraction of the ballet act which happens very late-on - damn little is really closed-loop-sans need for human oversight, on many scales. Yes, closed loop eventually happens to certain parts -- after all the work has been done, and as complexity demands coordination and even time-share.

Even then, as problems occur - there is No Such Thing as "machine self-diagnosis and repair", except in your dreams, sheltered IT-person [insert Icelandic thorn-in-side]

(Next you'll be suggesting that some "farm" (?) of Billyware toy computers - might be a lot like a real computer ;-)


moi



Who still considers it a violation of Maxwell's Daemon and a few other hoary Laws:
that such a complex once ran for over a week - with mere 5 min/2 hours maint. checks == all those N! failure points just Didn't. Producing 5.5 10E12 particles per pulse 24/7 the rest of that period. Aside from required delivery optics changes - the main "collection of sources" (one several hundred meters up a hill + a beamline of magnets to transport same) managed to maintain near-exact repetition with little intervention.

Tell me again about your PByte Tandem processing millions of advertainment requests and printed spam <--> for another comparison. One is Science+Art; the other ___ is Donald Trump handmaiden support. Youse guys are tending the ovens of the new Auschwitz of The Mind. The slow death by ad-permeation of every second of 'life' that replaces Life.
Our Futchah, post '00:

Ads from the toilet bowl. Truly 'embedded' OSs to boot.
The McDoggie you ate for lunch will transmit its embedded message as and where you sit. Talking/Singing Shit [tm] [MadeinUSA]
[~Late 2006?]