This article first appeared in ALICE Matters, the fortnightly newsletter of the ALICE experiment.
The new ALICE Run Control Centre was inaugurated on the occasion of the collaboration dinner organized at Point 2 during the recent ALICE week. Eight months of restructuring works have reshaped the internal space arrangement of the working areas and fully refurbished all the services such as air conditioning and networking. Almost one hundred collaborators participating to the ALICE week dinner had the chance to enter the ARC for the first time and to get a live experience of the new environment.
In fact the ARC is already being used by several detector groups to carry on the first standalone tests since all the ALICE online systems underwent major improvements in terms of hardware and software requiring now a very intense phase of integration and commissioning. At the same time the ARC was recently used to manage one of the LHC dry runs, in which the machine activity is simulated in order to verify that all the interface systems with the experiment do respond correctly.
I was personally very happy that our collaborators who signed up for the ALICE dinner could experience the ARC already in an operational phase in addition to appreciating the new ergonomic and neat style. I was also very happy that all the celebration preparation was somewhat kept hidden from me and during a short toast I was "given" as a gift a nice wall handler to hold the beam line technical drawings and that a very stylish and colourful banner with the "Alice Run Control Center" stamp on it appeared from nowhere.