| Summary: | We present the software system used to control and operate the South Pole Telescope. The South Pole Telescope is a 10-meter millimeter-wavelength telescope designed to measure anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) at arcminute angular resolution. In the austral summer of 2011/12, the SPT was equipped with a new polarization-sensitive camera, which consists of 1536 transition-edge sensor bolometers. The bolometers are read out using 36 independent digital frequency multiplexing (DfMux) readout boards, each with its own embedded processors. These autonomous boards control and read out data from the focal plane with on-board software and firmware. An overall control software system running on a separate control computer controls the DfMux boards, the cryostat and all other aspects of telescope operation. This control software collects and monitors data in real-time, and stores the data to disk for transfer to the United States for analysis. © 2012 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). The South Pole Telescope is supported by the National Science Foundation through grants ANT-0638937 and ANT-0130612. Partial support is also provided by the NSF Physics Frontier Center grant PHY-0114422 to the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, the Kavli Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The McGill authors acknowledge funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and Canada Research Chairs program. M. Dobbs acknowledges support from an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship." Work at NIST is supported by the NIST Innovations in Measurement Science program. The work at Argonne National Laboratory, including the use of facility at the Center for Nanoscale Materials (CNM), was supported by Office of Science and Office of Basic Energy Sciences of the U.S. Department of Energy, under Contract No. DEAC02-06CH11357. Technical support from Nanofabrication Group at the CNM, Argonne National ...
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