Weekly Report for Week Ending August 28, 2003

The LIGO Executive Committee Agenda for Monday  September 1, 2003 will be:

 CANCELLED DUE TO HOLIDAY

Special Announcements:

Weekly Report Highlights
 

LSC Issues (Saulson)

Minutes of LSC Executive Committee meeting
dinner at the August LSC meeting, Hannover
18 August 2003, at the Gartensaal, Hannover
 

In attendance: Strain, Willke, Wiseman, Sigg, Reitze, Lazzarini, Sanders,
Weiss, Finn, Barish, Allen, Giaime, Whitcomb, Riles, Saulson
 

Discussion about the state of S1 papers: We noted with happiness that
the Instrument paper and the Pulsar paper have been posted on gr-qc, with
the Inspiral paper to be posted any day. (Note: It was posted by the
end of the week of the LSC meeting.) The Stochastic paper is delayed slightly
by an exchange between the group and the Ad Hoc Review Committee (Allen,
Finn, and Saulson), but all involved will endeavor to close this out soon.
 

DMT Support: Keith Riles reported on discussions he and John Zweizig have led
about the LSC taking responsibility for supporting the DMT, including
support for Linux systems. This effort got a big boost with the approval
of the ITR 2003 proposal (P.I. Erik Katsavounidis) that will pay for 6 FTEs
at PSU, UWM, Caltech, and MIT. John would continue to be a key player, and the likely
head of the new LSC committee or Working Group. The LSC Executive Committee
agreed that this effort should move forward, and asked that Keith and John
prepare a more detailed proposal that would describe how the new body would
function, what resources would be available, how change control and quality
assurance would be performed. The consensus was that if this proposal looks
good then it would likely be approved on a provisional basis; to be revisited
after 6 months or so to make sure the transition is going smoothly.
 

LIGO/LSC stance on scientific misconduct: Barry Barish introduced the issue
of the need for LSC-wide discussions of the possibility of scientific
misconduct or unethical behavior. Recent events at Bell Labs and Berkeley have
made it clear that physics isn't immune to this kind of problem. Large
collaborations, especially, need to develop a culture that makes people
sensitive to the problem, and that makes it clear that misconduct won't be
tolerated. The LSC Executive Committee agreed that we ought to appoint a
committee to develop both a policy on misconduct and to investigate particular
strategies to increase the chance that any fraud could be detected. Suggestions
include: carrying out independent analyses to check a detection, using the
paper review process to make the kinds of cross-checks that might reveal
a fraud, and finding technical means to safeguard against rogue hardware
injections or tampering with the data.
 

LSC in LIGO Outreach: LSC members need to be able to show the NSF that they
are involved in outreach. We discussed a near-term mechanism that might help
proposers by allowing them to negotiate participation in LIGO's ongoing
outreach efforts. Formalizing such discussions in the MOU would document the
participation. In the longer term, the Advanced LIGO proposal has an outreach
component aimed at replicating best practices at all interested LSC sites. LSC
members should get involved with the planning of that process, as the AdLIGO
proposal moves closer to approval.
 

Pace of S2 analysis: We discussed the tension between getting timely results
from the S2 data and the desire to accomplish substantially more than was
possible for S1. After vigorous discussion, a consensus was reached that it
was a good idea for the Search Groups to aim for preliminary results at the
November LSC meeting; the discussion recognized that this could entail
limiting ambitions for the scope of the analyses. Otherwise, we fall too far
behind the pace of new data. Also, by forcing ourselves to produce results
then data analysis can contribute information to the commissioning process.
Assuming the groups can keep to this goal, then a projected publication
timeline would be:

Nov LSC meeting: Preliminary results
Dec GWDAW: Sharing of selected early results
Mar LSC meeting: approval of final S2 papers
May APS meeting: presentation of mature results, already submitted for publication

Stan Whitcomb also proposed that LSC members offer to give seminars at Virgo
institutions, bar groups, or other places that community members could
critique the analyses. This would help to fulfill the spirit of the recent
GWIC agreements on community discussion of results prior to publication.
 

S3 Run: Keith and Stan presented the schedule of Mini-runs and an Engineering
Run prior to the official start of S3. Gary noted the schedule slip of the
HEPI installation at LLO, and warned that one possible outcome might be an
extension of S3 beyond the nominal ending date of 5 Jan 2004. What course
of action will actually be taken is to be determined later.

LIGO I Construction/LIGO Laboratory Administration (Lindquist)

LIGO Weekly Site Telecon (Lindquist)

A site teleconference was held on Thursday, August 28, 2003.  The following were among the issues discussed:

Construction Expenses - The Construction Project will be shut down Financially Spetember 30.  It is important for all transactions to be completer before then.  Current costs plus invoiced amounts are within $2,000 of the $292.1 million cooperative agreement amount.

FY 2003 Operations Costs - looking at preliminary August data, it appears that carry forward into FY 2004 will remain steady at $5.8 - $6 million.

LHO Laboratory Building - Everything has been done towards completing the glass vestibule that can be done without the glass, which is expected later this week.

P-Card Training - Scheduled in Hanford September 15 and 16,
The list of current actions revised to reflect the status of open actions assigned through August 28, 2003 may be found at ACTION LIST.

From: Ed Chargois <chargois_e@ligo.caltech.edu>

• Nothing significant to report..

>From: Linda Turner - turner@ligo.caltech.edu>

Web pages for the DCC give simple how-to's for document numbering, easy access to the latest on-line documents, and search capabilities for the DCC database. Take a look. . .

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

• No report this week.
• Reminder to LIGO staff:  Please make sure that as a minimum, each document submitted has a LIGO number, author's name, and date.  Many documents are missing one of more of these essential pieces of information!

ACTIVITY
Continued to process and organize LSC documents.  Processed a small stack of Amaldi Conference documents. 

08/28/03	Packages	Faxes
In	15	17
Out	9	23

Press here to access the DOCUMENT CONTROL CENTER WEB PAGE.

From: Esther Cunningham <esther@ligo.caltech.edu>

Press here for ACCOUNTS PAYABLE HISTORY DATA .

From: "Brambila, Ruth" <Ruth.Brambila@caltech.edu>

• Working on the purchase order and change orders 1 and 2  for the new contract to Southern Enterprises.  Working on the purchase order to Joe LaCour.
• Completing justifications, worksheets and paperwork on all subcontract change orders processed in my absence.
• Placing pcard orders as they come in.
• Working on change order #5 to GP Manufacturing.

•  No report.

• Prepared an analysis of recent Excel Invoices.
• Worked on issues related to Visitor Program, we are still waiting for response from University of Oregon to questions regarding their billings for Visitors.
• Reviewed latest  version of FY2004 budget and started preparing proforma schedules for financial reporting.
• Updated reports for August.

 
• Financial reports can be found at: http://docuserv.ligo.caltech.edu/~fireport

From: irena@ligo.caltech.edu (Irena Petrac)

• No report this week (Los Alamos)

• The glass vestibule for the LHO Laboratory Building is not yet complete.  Everything is done except the placing of the glass.  This work needs to be completed so we can pay the final invoices to Chervenell, which will enable us to close out the construction cooperative agreement.
• A decision has been made to re-procure the effort now being performed by Excel at LLO.  Basically, this is performance as a blanket contractor to perform ad hoc tasks at the observatory.  A statement of work is now being generated.  The schedule calls for release of an RFP before the end of September, with award of a new contract by the end of October or the beginning of November.

SUPPORT (Baldon, Lloyd, Tischler)

>Irene Baldon

• Processed the paper work for nine (9) new/revised trips.  There are approximately three (3) trips in various stages of completion before ticketing can be done and/or paper work completed.  And an additional six (6) general inquiries.  Until further notice I will be doing travel for LHO travelers.  I continue to do MIT's travel to the sites for installation activities and also to assist them wherever possible.
• I have closed out approximately 85% of the LIGO/SURF Student Travel Reports and have only the foreign students left who arrived later and will be completing their stay later due to their European academic schedule.
• Completed thirty-one (31) Expense Reports and there are eleven (11) reports yet to be done.  I continue to contact travelers who have outstanding Expense Reports (more than one (1) month old) to ask for their cooperation in sending me their receipts so that they can be closed in a timely manner.  Presently there are two (2) reports more than 30 days old.
• Reconciled twenty-one (21) P-Card items which required numerous phone calls to hotels, car rentals, etc., in order to track down which traveler incurred which charge; and the pulling of each traveler's file to assure that charges are correct for each fee incurred.
• Prepared and distributed the Travel/Vacation Itinerary for August 27, 2003.  Arranged three (3) new teleconferences and arranged one (1) new reservation on the LIGO Calendar.

 

 

• No report this week (vacation).

• Photo project in conjunction with roster
• Addressed eye exam and laser safety issues -scheduling
• Addressed issues re: Outreach proposal w/Lindquist -FastLane submission
• Space survey for PMA internal
• Worked on New LIGOite checklist for Sites to help obtain info requested by Caltech HR w/Akutagawa and CIT HR

ADVANCED LIGO (Cost Schedule Control Systems) T. Frey
From: Thomas Frey <tfrey@ligo.caltech.edu>
Out of the office on Friday the 22nd.

For list of documents that are being used to develop Adv. LIGO Cost and Schedule, see http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/~tfrey/Cost_MTG_082002/

Continued development of a proposal for implementing Primavera Project Planner Enterprise.
Continue working on draft text of implementation.

Clink on links to view the Draft Work-plan and Estimate.

Continue testing of Primavera Enterprise version 3.5.1.  See the links below for information / technology demonstrations:

Primavision - http://primavision.drmcnatty.com:8080/phoenixwl/login_p3ec  Login using Username:  admin and Password:  admin.

Progress Reporter - http://www.projwebsite.com/GroupServerP3e/en/  Login using Username:  admin and Password:  admin.

Static HTML Example - http://ligo.caltech.edu/~tfrey/SUS_WebProj/ (AdL Suspensions Only)  NOTE:  This is after importing and before any data corrections.

Static HTML Example - http://ligo.caltech.edu/~tfrey/DAQ_WebProj/ (AdL DAQ Only)  NOTE:  This is after making adjustments to the WBS so that it displays as expected.

Corresponded with David Shoemaker regarding the installation of P3e on his laptop.

Executed phone conference with Carol Wilkinson, and prepared several reports that she requested.

Per my phone conference with Carol, I have queried our Primavera dealer regarding the product MonteCarlo for the purpose of executing Schedule / Cost Risk Analysis.  See this link for details:  http://www.primavera.com/products/p3_montecarlo.html
Will attend the Users conference in November at Orlando, Florida.  See http://www.primavera.com/events/conference.html

Prepared data in response to a NSF question regarding the increase for expenditures between years 2002 and 2003.

The following is a summary of status by sub system:
COC - Still need completed WBS dictionary and BOE.

PSL -  No action items pending.  Followed up with Peter and Benno has provided data.  Peter has yet to review.

AOS - Still need completed WBS dictionary and BOE.

IO -  Still need completed WBS dictionary and BOE.

SUS - No action items pending.  I will make a first cut of schedule changes for Janeen to review.

SEI - No action items pending.

ISC - Still need completed WBS dictionary and BOE.

LDAS - No action required at this point in time.

INSTALL - No action items pending.

DAQ - No action required at this point in time.

PM - No action required at this point in time.

FAC - No action required at this point in time.

SUP - No action required at this point in time.

ROSTER DATABASE:
BK is continuing work on action items.

Finished Input of supervisor, dept., and specialty codes.  Received several comments and started input of changes / corrections.

Worked with Barbara Kratochwill, and setup the ability for Ryan to add photographs to the roster database / web.  Met with Mike Pedraza to confirm that Ryan has access to the server for the roster database.

COST BOOK DATABASE:
BK is continuing work on action items.

Project Web Site for posting schedule and progress related data continues to be updated with the latest and greatest.

See http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/~tfrey/index.html

We are working on two proposals and work plans:

• FY 2004 Annual Report and Request for FY 2004 Funds,
• Outreach Proposal Revision.

We had a teleconference with a number of the people involved in the Outreach Proposal on Monday.  Actions were assigned to review and adjust budgets and text.  I have incoporated top level suggestions into our rather simplistic budget model and provided copies to M. Zucker.  Mike is to meet with LA SUBR to discuss their possible reductions.  The next teleconference is scheduled for Monday September 8.

The following change requests are open.

CR-030015	FY 2003 Livingston Observatory Detector Maintenance Expenses (Increment)	R. Wooley	July 14, 2003
CR-030016	Hanford Facilities 2.2--Divide the Large Equipment Access to Facilitate Movement of Large Items (currently assigned to FY 2004 liens list)	J. Worden	July 31, 2003

From: Cindy Akutagawa <cindy@ligo.caltech.edu>

• Various personnel/payroll /HR related work.

Quality/Safety (Tyler)

• Nothing significant to report this week.

LIGO Hanford Observatory (LHO) and Interferometer Operations (Raab)

Summary of Commissioning Activities at LIGO Hanford Observatory
(compiled by M. Landry)
 

2K IFO

The primary subscription on the 2k was for continued WFS commissioning, e.g. after landing five times more light on WFS 2,3 and 4 on the REFL, path, a new sensing matrix was obtained.  Initial attempts to close all refl loops have been unsuccessful.

Driving the 2k ETMX in pitch (yaw), significant mixing of the drive to yaw (pitch) was noted, as if a pair of of wires may have been crossed.   Other suspensions look fine.  This will be investigated.
 

4K IFO

Post-meat locker adjustments and alignments continued on the 4k ISCT4, including the installation of 2" optics to reduce clipping.  Hard work at these issues over the weekend had the IFO back in lock by Tuesday.  A nice summary of the current ISCT4 optical layout is given here .

An odd instability was noted in the ITMy alignment , useful to note when aligning.  The bias module of the optic was disconnected and then reconnected, resulting in at least a temporary restoration of predictable behaviour.

A disturbing 15% drop in PSL power over 90 days was attributed to the 126MOPA.  The MOPA amp current was raised to bring the PSL power back to its level of 90 days ago, however, not all power monitors were so restored .
 

LIGO Livingston Observatory (LLO) and Interferometer Operations (Zucker)

L1 commissioning
----------------------------------------------
Work proceeds on WFS commissioning and stabilizing interferometer
operation. An RF measurement of the recycling
cavity length and asymmetry confirmed that the length
correction made during the late July vent was effective;
however the sideband coupling, which was expected to improve
as a result, did not. We are investigating
this puzzle.
 

A new photodiode has been installed, wired and tested on
the dark port in preparation for moving to the H1 configuration,
which uses a separate lock acquisition detector. Addition
of a fast mechanical shutter (arrived today) will permit removal
of the EO shutter, which has been observed causing beam
clipping.
 

The acoustic isolation
enclosure over ISCT4 was ready and ready for installation, but hit
a snag at the last minute when it was discovered the lifting rig
was not correctly rated. Work was stopped (correctly!) and the proper
rig placed on order, to arrive next week. Meanwhile other tasks
will be advanced to make full use of the long weekend.
 

Two brief power outages Saturday night caused no permanent damage,
but interrupted commissioning and highlighted several vulnerabilities
in protection hardware and powerup
sequences. For example, some LDAS units would easily have ridden out
the interruption on their UPS backups but were shut down preemptively
by overprotective interlock protocols, and some CDS boot sequences
and parameter restoration routines were found to be obsolete. Revised
and expanded outage and boot procedures are being prepared for review
the week of 9/8.
 
 

Safety/security (Riesen)
----------------------------------------------
1)  Preparing for site security gate commissioning tomorrow.
2)  Instructing LLO personnel on gate operating procedures.
3)  Conducted site wide safety walk through, found no safety concerns.
4)  Work is 90% complete on the table swipe auto laser warning signs.
5)  Working with Excel in repairing or replacing swipe card readers site wide.
6)  Preparing draft for site wide "shutdown" and "power up" procedure for
safety/security.
7)  Closing in on instructing all Operators for "Registered User" access,
(1/2 there).
 

CDS Software (Khan, Paramesewariah is on travel)
---------------------------------------------
1) Upgraded the Frame Builder 2, and made it compatible with the new LDAS
file system SAN/qfs.
 

2) Spent most of the time bringing up the controllers after the power
outage.
 

3) Tested the new Diagnostic and System Monitoring software, to be used in
the control room for monitoring the status of the CDS Controllers.
 

4) Fixed the bug in the Mode Cleaner Autolocker sequencer, that used to give
false LOCK indication.
 

Inspiral veto analysis (Yun Yong Wang)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
I'm still doing the veto studies for the S2 Inspiral data analysis. 16 L1:ASC
channels have been examined with respect to 8 'trigger events' using
filters. The coherent glitches could be found only in WFS1_QP, WFS1_IP,WFS2_IY,
 WFS2_IP, WFS2_QY and WFS2_QP channels. The results are posted in my
LIGO web page
        http://www.ligo-la.caltech.edu/~wangyy
These 6 channels could be used as additional vetos.
 

IFO Commissioning, High Power Laser Facility, Optical Modeling (Rupal Amin)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
WFS- I have begun and continue investigation into the WFS 2's anomalous
operating characteristics.  Following last week's loss of the DC
response, Mike Fyffe assembled a 25-pin breakout box for diagnosing the
DC output of the WFS 2 head.  Thus far, results are inconclusive.  WFS
2's segment 1 photodiode has reactivated perhaps over the weekend and
has begun generating an DC voltage again. After consulting Ken Watts
about the problem and finding a few more poor solder points, I have
decided to request a new WFS PD board be sent to LLO for immediate
installation. I will begin measuring the sensitivity matrix tonight for
each WFS photodetector.  If we have a fully operational IFO, perhaps WFS
will be online next week?
 

Mode Cleaner- The last week has been an  active week during the
day (trees falling down plus skidding activities). This prohibited the
mode cleaner from establishing lock.  During periods when the mirror
drivers could maintain lock, the suspensions' oscillations exceeded any
DTT induced excitations.  Coherence and the FFTs were apocryphal.
Evenings were absorbed into IFO realignment and prohibited mode cleaner
activity. On Saturday, 23 August 2003, I was able to conduct roughly 40
% of the repair using MC2 only.  Unfortunately, my data, the mode
cleaner, and IFO were lost in the sudden power failure.
 

HPL (High Power Laser Facility)- Construction has resumed in the HPLF.
So far Excel has installed the ceiling camera. I have found an
acceptable interlock system and given it to Allen Sibley for purchase
and installation. Also, the HPLF SOP is in review at UF.  A comparison
is being made between the HPLF SOP and SOPs/safety procedures used at
other national labs (such as LLNL). Modifications to the HPLF SOP will
be amended as requested and prior to the permanent installation of the
100 W laser.
 

Melody- To assist Ken Franzen, I have started learning Melody and am
attempting to build an AdvLIGO mode cleaner model that supports the
three primary thermal effects (expansion, thermal lensing, and
photoelastic effects).
 

Power Failure Recovery-
I helped to get LLO back up on Saturday and Monday following the power
failure. I inspected the ion pumps as per Rusyl Wooley's instructions.
Later Saturday evening, Tom and I helped Ash bring the DAq crates
online.
 

IFO commissioning and data analysis (Franzen)
----------------------------------------------
1) I started to investigate how to implement the LOS f2p output matrix
filters together with Weili Ke, Brian O'Reilly and Gabriela Gonzalez.
 

2) I tried to compile a lalapps code called donald which would be used
for veto studies here at LLO. I could not make it work so now I will
instead try to use the Medusa cluster at UWM where I now have an
account.
 

3) Using e2e I calculated the ASQ response functions from dETM and RM
wiggling while changing the ETM losses. I can see a large change in the
RM response if the losses are asymmetric. I will investigate this some
more.
 
 

General Computing and LDAS (Roddy)
---------------------------------------------
GC;
Most of the end of last week and the weekend was spent cleaning out
worms and viruses from all of the windows machines.  ~20 machines were
infected with W32.Welchia.Worm.  It took approximately one hour per
machine to install service pack 4, the RPC/DCOM hotfix, then run the
worm removal tools.  Greater than 45 windows machines exist on site that
had to be looked at.  This is a mix of NT4, Windows 98, 2000, XP, and
2000 Server.  This makes for a very time consuming task since there is
no easy way to script this sort of thing on windows, hence you must
physically go to every machine and look at them individually.  There is
also no easy way to automate updates since it is incumbent on the users
themselves to ensure that the machine is updated.  This latest
infestation is also troubling since it means that a user had to
transport this worm into the LLO network, since the firewall would have
blocked all attempts to infect the network from the internet.  This
probably means someone came to work with an infected laptop.  In the
future, I believe that DHCP addresses must be quarantined in some way
from the rest of the network.
 

Went through the usual round of ordering parts, licenses, etc. for
various people.  Matlab toolboxes, Mathematica renewals, etc.
 

Contacted Solsoft to get my software updates and a new license.  Also
worked with them to figure out a couple of software bugs which turned
out to be a result of an unsupported Java version.
 

Trying to find a contact at Sun that I can discuss LDAP issues with.  I
was finally forwarded to John Fragalla.  Turns out he is the Caltech
service engineer, and if he cannot answer the questions that I have, he
will see to it that thye are forwarded along to someone that
can.(Shannon Roddy)
 

LDAS:
Working on some VPN issues.  There are some strange things going on that
only affect outbound large file transfers for the CIT leg of the VPN
tunnels.  I am still looking in to this and hope to have it resolved by
the end of the week.(Shannon Roddy)
 

LDAS (Yakushin)
----------------------------------------------
LDAS admin:
1) A bad drive has been replaced in the tape robot.
2) Level 1 and 2 RDS have been archived.
3) During the power outage on Saturday, the power was completely shut
down in the LDAS room due to power panel settings. That was an overkill
since all our storage and servers are on UPS and could easily handle
such short problems with power supply. The settings have been adjusted.
 

LDAS data analysis:
Debugging parallelized version of waveburst (waveburst+).
 
 

E2E suspension modeling (T Findley and S. Yoshida)
----------------------------------------------
We calibrated the OSEM gains for the LOS.box and SOS.box. The power spectra
of the simulated pos, pitch, and yaw motions show the feature that as the
gain is increased the table peaks (around 1.5 Hz) grows and the peak at the
natural frequencies of the optic decreases. The overall shape of the
spectra resemble the corresponding DAQ signals. We updated the MMT and SM
boxes with the calibrated SOS and LOS boxes.

Detector/Technical Support (Coyne)

no report

40 Meter Interferometer (Weinstein)

• Fumiko Kawazoe and Shihori Sakata are beginning work on the 40m. Please make them welcome!
• Installation (Vass, Miyakawa, Smith, everyone):
• Osamu has re-established the alignment of the PSL -> IOO -> ITMx and ITMy, and back out the SP and AP. Michelson fringes have been observed!!
• Steve & Mike have installed all the components in the vacuum chambers, and Mike is doing the last alignments (of the Initial Pointing beam position and angle beams to QPDs).
• Well, a few more components remain: Bob is installing the last mirrors for camera views. Camera views for ITMx, ITMy, ETMx, ETMy are in place; the one for the beam input to the faraday isolator is going in today, and and one for BS/PRM/SRM will go in last (next Tuesday). One or two more optical viewports need to be installed.
• The two in-vac PZT steering mirrors were tested successfully by Ben. However, he only had enough cable to test one of them at a time. He's made a 2nd cable, but encountering problems. We need to have both PZT's powered for the final alignment. Fortunately, these PZTs have strain-gauge readbacks and feedback loops, so we can be optimistic that they will return to their proper places when they get powered on again.
• Mike's autocollimator was finding that the ETMx yaw was changing from day to day, even though the OSEMs showed no indication of movement. Fortunately, there's bee no evidence of movement in the last ~ 5 days. An oplev is monitoring it.
• Picomotor controls for the MMT and the in-vac shutter flags all check out.
• All the oplevs were set up and aligned by Naman before she left, but they all need to be re-aligned.
• Mike & Steve eliminated a potential clipping of the AP beam on the faraday isolator, by moving things slightly.
• We hope to complete this installation and alignment, check everything out, and pump down early next week.
• Electronics (B. Abbott, Heefner, Taylor)
• PZT controls for in-vac steering mirrors: Ben finished testing the PZT chain; as of last Friday, everything checked out fine. Ben made and routed a second cable so that both PZT could be actuated simultaneously. When this was done, the old PZT controller didn't work properly. Ben's out of town till next Tuesday, will check it out then.
• The interface board for the PZT controls should be in tomorrow, and in place next week.
• Aidan's photon actuator experiment design came back from the boardhouse on Friday. Aidan stuffed it and is still in the process of testing it ready for use early next week.
• Ben has made up and finished two of the the ISS PD boxes and six PD heads for Flavio so that he can test his ISS boards with the PDs in place.
• Art and Bob are continuing to work on the LSC and ASC rack cross-connects. They have been wired, mounted, and grounded.
• Ben has compiled a list of components that we will need to finish the ASC and LSC systems, and is taking steps to get everything we need.
• Lisa G finished wiring up all of the video monitors in the control room, and spiffed up the video switch control screen.
• Jay and Ben will assemble the equipment they need to move all the front end timing signals to a separate "pizza box" crate, independent of the DAQS crate.
• Jay and Ben are thinking about 166 RFPDs and demodulation, and double demod.
• Optical levers (Bhatt, Goggin, Smith, Vass, Taylor):
• Just before Naman left, we turned on the oplev servos and used them to control the pitch and yaw of the suspended optics at DC. It worked reasonably well for ETMy and BS. The beams were blocked at ITMy and ETMx for various reasons. The ITMx oplev sorta worked, but the response was consistent with the beam moving off of the QPD.
• With Naman gone, Fumiko will take over the development of this system.
• The oplev beams (red) are attenuated to only a few microwatts by the time they get to the QPDs. Most of the loss appears to be at the suspended optics. More reflectivity can be obtained by moving the beams off of the coated part of the optic surface. We will attempt to maximize the light on the QPDs as part of the final checkout next week.
• PSL and ISS (O. Miyakawa, B. Abbott, R. Abbott, F. Nocera, D. Ugolini, S. Vass, C. Mow-Lowry):
• Conor is documenting all of the changes he made to the PSL table, and the changes he and Ben and Rich made to the FSS board.
• Ben accidentally blew the PA85 on the FFS board, then promptly fixed it.
• Ben made the HVamp daughter board on the FSS card into a permanent mod.
• Osamu found that the PSL beam was getting clipped slightly at one of the IOO pockels cells. This explained the ellipticity Conor had noted before. Osamu re-aligned it and eliminated the clipping.
• Conor then re-aligned the two IOO monitoring QPDs near the periscope. He is all set to re-commissioni the MCR and MCT monitoring QPDs as soon as the MC is back up.
• Conor cleaned up the PSL table, removing all unused components.
• Optical sensing (Smith):
• OPTICS PARTS LIST, Orders pending: Spherical collection mirror from Rolyn for the BRDF meter.
• 40 M IFO PRE-ALIGNMENT: The symmetric (bright) port was aligned by centering the PSL input beam with a target at the ITMx and then retroreflecting from the ITMx to produce the bright port beam. The overlappig reflection from ITMy produced visible fringes at the bright port. The initial pointing beam splitters were aligned by using modecleaner flashes to produce an observable initial pointing beam. The initial pointing position beam was aligned out through the viewport. The initial pointing angle beam remains to be directed out the the x-end viewport. Spacers need to be placed to raise the x and y end optical tables to the designed 4 inch beam height. The IFO PZT steering mirrors change their pointing direction when energized; however, the pointing direction can be adjusted electronically and when the PZT feedback loop is activated, the mirrors appear to reproduce their pointing when the voltage is turned on and off. One of the steering mirrors was not functioning electronically. The video image mirrors in the BSC chamber and input chamber for observing the Faraday isolator input aperture were installed and aligned. Beam dumps were placed in the BSC chamber to catch the reflected beams from the x and y spoiling flags in front of the ITMx and ITMy mirrors. The POX pickoff mirror was installed and aligned. The ETMx and ETMy output optical trains have not been aligned. All optical lever beams are functioning, but may require final alignment. The video turning mirror for viewing the BS from the input chamber is assembled and awaiting installation.
• PHOTON DRIVE R&D: The test of the photon actuation control of the mode cleaner is awaiting the pump down and commissioning of the mode cleaner. Aidan Crook is staying an extra week and will test the photon actuation control of the mode cleaner after it is locked. He has boards from Ben and from Jay to test his servo, which is designed to notch out a line in the MC error signal at 153 Hz (a mechanical resonance of the MC suspensions).
• Modeling (Miyakawa, Kawamura, Eichenfield):
• Seiji continues to develop a model of the 40m and AdvLIGO with Finesse, and comparing with Twiddle calculations. He's exploring the use of double demodulation in all degrees of freedom to improve the LSC matrix.
• Computing (Ivanov, Bork, Goggin, Wallace, Bogue, Pedraza):
• Lisa Bogue set up samba to serve the our online software disk (op140m:/cvs/cds/caltech) to PCs on our martian network. Jay installed EPICS on our PC laptops. Now we can run EPICS and medm screens on PCs, with no extra load on op140m!
• Jay and Alex think they know why many of the new EPICS channels (for oplevs and QPDs) are not being read out correctly for logging to frames or display with dataviewer. They will need to reboot DAQS (and just about everything else) to implement the fix. They'll do that early next week.
• Lisa G has constructed a new "40m checklist" medm screen with most all important EPICS channels, so that the status of all active systems can be seen at a glance.
• Jay is working on getting the epics timeserver going so that epics will finally know what time it is!
• Lisa was able to reboot zuben, the Sun blade 100 on Dennis' desk.
• South Annex Bake Ovens (Taylor):
• Bob is shipping baffles for LHO to the heat treaters.
• Bob is cleaning some parts for Larry Jones.
• Bob is cleaning up the South Annex clean room, and re-organizing the cabinets so that less time is spent looking for parts.

Thermal Noise Interferometer (Libbrecht)

no report

LASTI (Ottoway)

LASTI Weekly Report (Mittleman,Sarin,Mason,McInnes,Thomas,Bakr,Allen
Ottaway)
 

EPI Installation at LASTI
 

The main supply and return lines from the pump room to all three HAM
chambers has been completed. We recieved a supply and return manifold
from Ken Mailand which will distribute the hydraulic fluid to the 8
actuators on the y-mid HAM. Plumbers are expected to finish this
plumbing on 9/12. After that we will be moving the hydraulic actuators
from the BSC chamber and installing them on the HAM.
 

The resistors arrived from Caltech. These will be installed in the pump
room to help determine the number of actuators which can be operated
with our pump. An adapter pipe is beeing made up to add this to existing
supply and return lines. We will be shutting down the HEPI isolation
system Tuesday in order to make this changeover.
 

EPI Design and Fabrication
 

A new solid model of the HEPI system was sent out this week along with 3
additional DCN's. All major componants have been completed. Several
small machined parts need to be finalized.
 

MIT Quadruple Pendulum Prototype
 

Andrew has been taking transfer functions from the actuators between the
two  #3 masses to the position sensors on mass #4.
 

 Software and Electronics
 

 Predeep has migrated the HEPI/MEPI control system to VME and is currently
setting up to control the MEPI system. He has also been investigating the
electronics noise in the sensor input electronics.
 

HEPI
 

We have been measuring the sensor correction coefficients to see if the
previous measurements, which found a difference in the X and Y
coefficients, still holds.
 

Laser Safety
The power kill switches have been installed at the entrances to all
the LIGO MIT labs. Once the lasers are powered of these they can be run
unattended.

Data Analysis and Computing (Lazzarini)

Simulation and Modeling (Bhawal)
E2E Weekly Physics Meeting
----------------------------
Matt, Hiro, Biplab discussed about the study of WFS loops for increased
power level - in relation to commissioning work currently in progress at LHO.
 

FFT results with new recycling cavity lengths
-------------------------------------
(Biplab) Detailed results with and without arm mirror phasemaps can be
 accessed starting from ~bbhawal/FFT/1README
 The old and new length values of recycling cavities are as follows:
 L1-old: [l+ = 9.2035, l- = 0.311], L1-new: [l+ = 9.180,  l- = 0.352]
 H1-old: [l+ = 9.184,  l- = 0.323], H1-new: [l+ = 9.184,  l- = 0.379]
 

 From Analytical calculations and FFT:
 The SB recycling gain in LLO increased (from ~24 to ~30) due to the
 correction of 2cm in l+ which has more effect than the effect of increasing
 l- from 311 to 352.
 Whereas in LHO4, the recycling gain decreased (from ~42 to ~26 due to the
 sole effect of increasing l- from 300 [old value used in FFT; actual value
 was 323] to 379. [CAUTION: All results in mode-matched state]
 

Code development and maintenance
---------------------------------
(Melody)
 - Continuing e2e source code modification to dynamically create
   C++ source from FUNC_xxx equation modules, which would be compiled,
   combined to a shared library, and used during runtime execution.
 
Alfi
-----
(Bruce) Continuing work on bundles and bundlers in Alfi (PR 272.)
 

LIGO Data Analysis System
 

Software Systems (Blackburn)
Core dumps in the frameAPI continue to be our biggest problem. Understanding
the source of these coredumps (and working on a fix) is the primary activity
of both of our C++ developers. Clean up of the total C++ code base continues
to remove poorly implemented uses of the container classes and there methods
which are know to be unstable and possible sources for failures seen.
 

Discovered a bug in the diskCacheAPI that caused regeneration of diskCache
data to fail. This has now been fixed.
 

The blocking data sends that caused the frameAPI and dataConditionAPI to
lock up have now been fixed using a threaded data send model.
 

Discovered a memory leak in the TCL layer of the eventMonitorAPI. The fix
for this is now being tested on the tandem LDAS system. Will be propagated
into CVS for the weekend tests.
 

Switched over to using rsh to spawn mpirun jobs in the mpiAPI. This resolved
an issue whereby data written to stdout or stderr was causing the OS to
leak ssh processes.
 

Added support to the managerAPI and controlMonitorAPI's client to block a
user's account for a temporary period of time. This was requested by the
LDAS staff at Observatories to handle unattended jobs that are causing the
system to crash as has been seen in previous two science runs.
 

Migrated the version of BWidget used in the controlMonitorAPI's client to
be version 1.6 (was version 1.4.1). This fixes several infinite loop bugs
in previous versions widget set. Updated documentation to reflect this
new version of Bwidget on the LDAS-Dev system.
 

Made good progress on open problem reports this week. This is the first
week where we have not been too busy with development and could make an
effort on problem reports.
 

Modified runLDAS script to grep the LDASapi.rsc file for the
managerAPI hostname.  This allows the script to run properly on a full
system as well as the tandem and standalone boxes.  It was tested on
the tandem and dev, and is now in cvs.
 

Tested the new user command with allows users to remove their own
data products from an LDAS system without support from system
administrators.
 

Ran inspiral DSO exclusively on ldas-dev to gather statistics on how
many the system can sustain.  The system was happy at 900/hr.  At
1200/hr, the system slowly built a queue, even when using RDS frames.
The frame throttle was set to 6.  Currently, the loop script cannot
send at a rate between 900 and 1200 because it uses second resolution.
I think it is possible to modify the script to use millisecond
resolution, but am not sure yet how to do it. *****At this rate the ldas-dev
system could analyze all three interferometers worth of data in less
than an day and possibly overnight.****
 

Hardware Systems (Anderson)
Caltech
-------
(Dan Kozak)
 

* At LLO:
 

        * Added 2nd fibre connections from gateway, dataserver and
          metaserver to FC switch.
        * Worked with STK to determine that we had a bad 9940B drive.
         * Tested SAM-QFS configuration.
        * Tested 3510, created metaserver:/newusr2 filesystem on it.
 

* At CIT:
 

        * Helped get LLO back up and running after power outage.
        * Compiled new (2.9a) version of hsi for future use on ldas-archive.
        * Got sam-releaser running at LHO.
        * Dealt with stuck 9940 tape at CIT.
        * Labeled all remaining unlabeled tapes in SAM part of Powderhorn
          silo. I am continuing to go thru and evaluate tapes that have
          failed to label properly.
        * Assisted with some performance testing of 3510s/2Gb FC.
 

(Hari Pulapaka)
 

* Have installed and running Condor installation on a small group of
  machines. Condor works well under RH 9.0 and Globus. But due to the ease
  of installation and the speed with which change can be affected, we
  decided to install the head node RH 7.3 and install VDT on that. So I am
  working on installing VDT.
 

* Installing LDR and getting familiar with the python code to enhance the
  functionality of LDR.
 

(Al Wilson)
 

* Working on kickstart for RH9 I have a new cfdef dir set for RH 9.
  There are some small changes with the conf files for printing, mail,
  nis+. This has be done only to ldas-sw.
 

* Continuing to pare down the RPM's for RH9 The latest victims are the first
  boot, and update RPM's.
 

* Working with Shannon on the VPN's
 

(Stuart Anderson)
 

* Worked on getting the 3510 disk cache ready for the production SAM-QFS
  system at Caltech.
 

* Started testing Multi-Path I/O features of the Solaris kernel to support
  multiple connections to the same storage devices for both performance
  and perhaps reliability improvements.
 

* Finished upgrading the motherboard BIOS on all ldasbox and diskcache systems
  at Caltech, but this has not resolved the ldasbox stability problems.
 

* Finished catching up with archiving old second trend frames from LHO now
  that the network performance to LHO has been fixed.
 

* Setup internal network interfaces for the 3 standalone Sun test machines
  to allow replicating nightly LDAS builds automatically.
 

* Initiated technical contacts with SDSC to share experience with operating
  SAM-QFS on similar hardware.
 

* Ordered 4 more STK9940B tape drives for the central archive.
 

MIT
---
(Keith Bayer)
 

* New Serial ATA pcraids should arrive today/tomorrow.
 

* Ordering cable trays for ldas lab.
 

* Still need to get together with Al for system cloning.
 

* Setting up gridftp network bw tests.
 

Livingston
----------
(Igor Yakushin)
 

* A bad drive has been replaced in the tape robot.
 

* Level 1 and 2 RDS have been archived.
 

* During the power outage on Saturday, the power was completely shut
  down in the LDAS room due to power panel settings. That was an overkill
  since all our storage and servers are on UPS and could easily handle
  such short problems with power supply. The settings have been adjusted.
 

* Dataserver has just died. Opened a case with SUN.
 

(Shannon Roddy)
 

* Working on some VPN issues.  There are some strange things going on that
  only affect outbound large file transfers for the CIT leg of the VPN
  tunnels.  I am still looking in to this and hope to have it resolved by
  the end of the week.
 

Hanford
-------
(Greg Mendell)
 

* The generation of the intersite S2 PEM RDS has nearly finished at
  Caltech. Some gaps remain in this data set, beyond actual gaps in the
  raw data. Since returning from the LSC meeting I have been writing and
  running scripts to deal with the gaps. I hope to have the data set ready
  for archiving and sending to LHO by next week.
 

* Working with LDAS to plan for the upcoming mini-runs, E10, and S3.
 

(Ben Johnson)
 

* Got a hold of the Froundry networks system engineer for this area.
  Ran the diagnostic commands he sent, and emailed the output back
  (performed on Tuesday Aug. 26).
 

* Received node46 back on Wednesday Aug. 27.  ASA has supposedly
  replaced the motherboard on the unit. Running a burntest now.
 

* Finally got the backupscript on the admin box running again. The
  D1000 is still reporting an error on c1t10d0s4. I'm looking into the
  details of the D1000; though it looks like we will have to replace the disk.
 

* The disk2disk copy script is in a working state. It is at the point
  of adding "well, this would be nice"-type features. I am presently
  working on the second script that keeps an eye on the status of the
  disk2disk copy script, and sends emails, etc. to the sysadmins.
 

Data Analysis Activities (Lazzarini)
 

(Creighton)
This week I finished checking the code for pulsar sky-search template
placement.  I have begun writing template placement code for directed
(narrow-field) sky searches with spindown.
 

(Mendell)
Attended the August 2003 LSC meeting in Hannover Germany.  Discussed
with the PULG group the stack-slide search (see DCC # LIGO-G030397-00-W)
and briefly my SURF student's parameter estimation code (see DCC #
LIGO-G030398-00-W). I also updated the LSC on code that independently
tests the code in LAL that gives the beam pattern response functions
(see DCC # LIGO-G030461-00-W) and gave a brief report on young nearby
neutron stars in the Gould belt as potential sources for the PULG group
(see DCC # LIGO-G030462-00-W).  I have started to work in the
stack-slide code again this week.
 

(Reilly)
I spent the last several days debugging and confirming that the new DSO
code is consistent with the old. After some bug fixes the two codes agree.
We can now run the DSO on large chunks of data and break those chunks
into any length we like. I am now begining the work to parallelize over
these chunks.
 

(Weinstein)
- Completed writeup of Amaldi talk on S1 burst search
  and submitted to LSC for review
- Preparing report on simulations for S2 burst search
 

(Yakushin)
Debugging parallelized version of waveburst (waveburst+).
 

General Computing (Wallace)
MIT:
(Keith)
-Troubleshot and patched SB100 machine with kernel panics.
 (most likely bad ram stick)
-Continue to patch sun boxes with sol 8 recommended patch set
-Spec'ing out another scsi hdd for gc backup
-Rebuilt sendmail on ligo with solaris-antispam.m4 package
 

Livingston:
(Shannon)
-Most of the end of last week and the weekend was spent cleaning out
worms and viruses from all of the windows machines.  ~20 machines were
infected with W32.Welchia.Worm.  It took approximately one hour per
machine to install service pack 4, the RPC/DCOM hotfix, then run the
worm removal tools.
Greater than 45 windows machines exist on site that
had to be looked at.  This is a mix of NT4, Windows 98, 2000, XP, and
2000 Server. This makes for a very time consuming task since there is
no easy way to script this sort of thing on windows, hence you must
physically go to every machine and look at them individually.  There is
also no easy way to automate updates since it is incumbent on the users
themselves to ensure that the machine is updated.
This latest infestation is also troubling since it means that a user had to
transport this worm into the LLO network, since the firewall would have
blocked all attempts to infect the network from the internet.  This
probably means someone came to work with an infected laptop.  In the
future, I believe that DHCP addresses must be quarantined in some way
from the rest of the network.
-Went through the usual round of ordering parts, licenses, etc. for
various people.  Matlab toolboxes, Mathematica renewals, etc.
-Contacted Solsoft to get my software updates and a new license.  Also
worked with them to figure out a couple of software bugs which turned
out to be a result of an unsupported Java version.
-Trying to find a contact at Sun that I can discuss LDAP issues with.  I
was finally forwarded to John Fragalla.  Turns out he is the Caltech
service engineer, and if he cannot answer the questions that I have, he
will see to it that they are forwarded along to someone that
can.
 

Hanford:
(Christine)
- Fixed the network bandwidth problem by replacing the fastethernet port
adapter with a gigE port adapter.  On Saturday I was getting 50 Mb/s on
transmit and 30 Mb/s on receive between ligo-wa and ligo.caltech.
During normal business hours I'm only getting 4 to 8 Mb/s on transmit
and ~30 Mb/s on receive.  I will do some off hour testing to verify that
this slow down is caused by normal network traffic and not a problem
with the router.
- Installed a trial version of the Calcium web calendar software on the
web server.  Terry Gunter will be evaluating the software.
- Working with Caltech ITS to get access to the software site licensing
web page.  As of Wednesday I have access to the web page, but when I try
to install any software, I don't have access to the download computer.
Still working with ITS to get it working.
 

CIT:
(Lisa)
- Updated the samba server in the 40meter martian network.  Did testing with Jay
to make sure that the medm screens would run on the wireless laptops.
- Reprogrammed the access point for the 40meter martian net.
- Did exit interviews with a number of students.
- Dealing with mail problems with some new visitors.
- Upgraded ganymede to sol9 using jumpstart.  Made some changes to the jumpstart
server as a result.  Currently building a /usr/local environment on ganymede so
that I can use it for testing software packages.
- Worked with Larry and the ATC people to try and figure out why our purchasing
folks can't communicate with the ATC business servers properly.
 

(Mike)
-Worked at 40-Meter installing print drivers for an hp5000 printer that I
swap them out with. This printer is to replace the one that went out on them.
-Worked with DCC helping Linda Turner setting up permissions and
transferring some files that she was having problems with while over in
Germany.
-Worked on an IBM laptop that is having problems with its pci wireless card.
I called IBM tech support, which I spent many hours being transferred
around on the phone until I got connected to a tech person that knew hoe to
troubleshoot this type of problem. He had me run a complete diagnostics and
then decided for me to send this laptop back to them to replace the
wireless card. This is exactly the same problem that Barry had with his IBM
laptop. This happens when walking across multiple wireless access points
which causes the internal wireless card to go nuts and will not work once
that happens. The strange thing about this when off campus like at home
with only one access point around the internal wireless card will work.
Apparently the only fix for this is to get the card replaced. IBM tech
support is a frustrating/painful experience.
-Worked with George, who is a consultant that is working on upgrading the
DCC access database.
-Setup the VRVS replacement computer for SCR. I loaded this computer
with all GC software and swap out the video capture card from the old
computer to the new one and loaded the Hauppauge drivers. I have had many
problems setting this unit up running on XP, but I have seem to have it
figured the problem out after running various tests with hardware/software.
I am now ready to put this VRVS computer back into to use via SCR.
-Swapped out a printer over in the back house of Wilson. Setup and
configured this printer as a local share that is not in the network printer
pool.
-There was a lot of user support this week; that included OS, printer &
virus problems that I corrected and cleaned up. I also worked with many
users showing them step-by-step instructions on how to update their
computers with Microsoft critical and Operating System patches.
 

(Larry)
-It has been an interesting past week. Updating machines with the latest patches
and virus definitions has been a time consuming effort.
-Worked with the DCC on various issues. Mostly getting documents put in the
correct locations and related items.
-Some minor trouble shooting of items for a couple of people that were on
travel.
-Made a number of supply purchases. Working on the maintenance contract with
SUN. We have a few more machines to add to the list.
Just as a note, many of the older memory types are no longer available. This is
a problem for the upgrade to one of our routers.
-Worked with the ATC group in trying to get some of our business computers back
online but we have done as much as we can do and will now have to wait for the
ITS people to get some router issues resolved.
-Dealt with a number of user account issues. Mostly extensions for SURF students
and some trouble shooting of corrupted login environments.
 

Advanced LIGO Development (Shoemaker)

For additional information about this report, contact sanders@ligo.caltech.edu