Open Access

Mei Bai, Aleksey Adonin, Sabrina Appel, Ralph C. Bär, Maria Cristina Bellachioma, Udo Blell, Christina Dimopoulou, Giuliano Franchetti, Oksana Geithner, Peter Gerhard, Lars Groening, Frank Herfurth, Regina Heß, Ralph Hollinger, Hanno C. Hüther, Harald Klingbeil, Andreas Krämer, Sergey A. Litvinov, Fabio Maimone, David Ondreka, Niels Pyka, Stephan Reimann, Andreas Reiter, Mariusz Sapinski, Bernhard Schlitt, Gerald Schreiber, Marcus Schwickert, Daniel Severin, Rahul Singh, Peter J. Spiller, Jens Stadlmann, Markus Steck, Ralph J. Steinhagen, Klaus Tinschert, Markus Vossberg, Gertrud Walter, Udo Weinrich

• After two-year's shutdown, the GSI accelerators plus the latest addition of storage ring CRYRING, will be back into operation in 2018 as the FAIR phase 0 with the goal to fulfill the needs of scientific community and the FAIR accelerators and detector development. Even though GSI has been well known for its operation of a variety of ion beams ranging from proton up to uranium for multi research areas such as nuclear physics, astrophysics, biophysics, material science, the upcoming beam time faces a number of challenges in re-commissioning its existing circular accelerators with brand new control system and upgrade of beam instrumentations, as well as in rising failures of dated components and systems. The cycling synchrotron SIS18 has been undergoing a set of upgrade measures for fulfilling future FAIR operation, among which many measures will also be commissioned during the upcoming beam time. This paper presents the highlights of the challenges such as re-establishing the high intensity heavy ion operation as well as parallel operation mode for serving multi users. The status of preparation including commissioning results will also be reported.