Web technology to support LHD experiment management

The large helical device (LHD), which is the world largest helical confinement system, is a national project serving Japanese fusion community. In LHD, experiments of 7000 shots are carried out for 250 proposals every year. Efficient experiment arrangement is required in order to carry out many collaborators’ proposal. Sometimes collaborators who are not familiar to LHD stay at NIFS only a few day to join the experiment. Issues are as follows: how to reduce collaborator's effort, how to reduce manager's effort to optimize the schedule; how to publicize plan and results of the experiment. We have developed web systems of virtual printer, experimental proposal and scheduling by using Ruby on Rails (RoR), which encapsulates relational data base (RDB) and AJAX. RDB enables to make tables by searching and sorting data with key words. Web servers are equipped in the virtual computer system in order to minimize efforts and cost of maintenance. The LHD web portal has been also developed in order to provide collaborators an efficient and intuitive interface to access the above systems, to take LHD information, and to use tools for LHD data analysis. The web systems have reduced collaborators’ and managers’ efforts significantly.