The control system is a daemon which runs on the LOFAR Main Control Unit (MCU). It watches for new parsets which describe upcoming observations and extracts relevant details. It maintains a queue of upcoming observations, and, where appropriate, configures the RSP boards (on the station Local Control Units) to select the appropriate data for AARTFAAC and starts the GPU correlator and CPU imaging pipeline with appropriate configuration using an AARTFAAC cfg file.
The MCU may be accessed through the LOFAR portal by ssh to mcu001. All
AARTFAAC-related tools on the MCU are installed in /opt/aartfaac. Note that
several tools on the MCU are old (Python 2.4, etc), but we are asked not to
install our own versions.
Parsets describing upcoming observations are written to disk in
/opt/lofar/var/run. The ID numbers in the filenames are not directly
useful, but they can be sorted by ctime.
The LCUs are accessed through the LOFAR portal by ssh to (eg) cs005c (for
CS005).
The RSPs are controlled using the command rspctl. For example:
$ rspctl --status