Weekly Report for Week Ending June 30, 2005

The LIGO Executive Committee meeting for July 4, 2005 is cancelled due to the holiday.

Special Announcements:

Weekly Report Highlights

LSC Issues (Saulson)

No report.

LIGO Laboratory Administration (Lindquist)

STATUS OF LSC MOUs (Lindquist)

LSC MOUs and Research Plans and Progress Reports

  • No report this week.

Non-LSC MOUs

  • No report this week.

SITE TELECONFERENCE (Lindquist)

No site teleconference was scheduled for Thursday, June 29, 2005.

  • The list of assigned actions updated through May 26, 2005 will be found Here.

PROPERTY MANAGEMENT (Chargois)

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

  • Nothing significant to report.

DOCUMENT CONTROL CENTER (Turner, Mak)

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

  • No report

>From: Cleveland Mak mak_c@ligo.caltech.edu

Week Ending

June 30, 2005

In

Out

Packages

19

5

Faxes

27

8
  • Assisting with the organization/processing of MOU's and Progress Reports.

COST SCHEDULE CONTROL SYSTEMS (Cunningham, Brambila, Kaufman)

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

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

  • Completed the first order in TechMart, which was a change order to an existing purchase order. Entered the order in Oracle and faxed the order to the vendor. He acknowledged receipt of the change.
  • Completed the "rush" Solsoft order in Techmart and faxed it to the vendor.
  • Attended TechMart training on requisitions.
  • Submitted the five original purchase orders (purchase orders: 1073960, 1074545, 1074834, 1076534 and 1077114) and the seven subcontract files (purchase orders: LSU 1022280; University of Oregon 1023451; Lawrence Berkeley 1031656; LSU 1068705; MIT 1053497; University of Michigan 1005452; and Southeastern Louisiana University 1010466), which are on the sample list generated for the PWC audit.
  •  Completed the purchase order monthly close out report for June 2005. Followed up on one open purchase order long open pending receipt of a backordered item.
  • Working on change order #2 to Raytheon.

>From: Florence Kaufman <fkaufman>

  • Assisted in the preparation of a spreadsheet showing current spending, commitments and funding on the Outreach Award as well as projected spending, commitments and funding to illustrate possible shortfall because commitments may need to be made before funding is received.
  • Investigating whether certain P-card expenditures in June may have been inappropriately classified as equipment to determine whether an expenditure type correction is warranted.
  • Noticed that a p-card expenditure In June may have been incorrectly classified as Supplies when it should qualify as Equipment, because it is a significant upgrade to an existing system. An expenditure type correction will be requested for this item.
  • Financial reports can be found at: http://docuserv.ligo.caltech.edu/~fireport. (For passwords contact Florence)

SUBCONTRACTS MANAGEMENT (Jasnow, Salone)

>From: Gina Salone <gsalone@ligo.caltech.edu>

  • Nothing significant to report..

>From: Ed Jasnow <jasnow@ligo.caltech.edu>

  • The RFQ for the construction of the LLO Science Education Center has been reviewed and approved.  The schedule calls for issuance of the RFQ to the five pre-qualified contractors on Tuesday, July 5, a pre-bid conference/job walk on Thursday, July 14, and the receipt and opening of bids on Wednesday, August 3.  Upon confirmation of the responsibility and responsiveness of the apparent low bidder, the contract will be submitted to the NSF for review and approval.  Award of the contract is anticipated for early September.  Under this schedule, the heaviest construction should be completed before the commencement of S5.
  • The new TechMart purchasing system was rolled out to the campus on June 20.  Training is being scheduled for campus personnel on a continuing schedule. Training for LHO staff has been scheduled for July 6 and July 12, using WEBEX technology.  The schedule for LLO training is still being determined.

SUPPORT (Baldon, Hiroto, Lloyd)

>Irene Baldon

  • Processed the paper work for six (6) new/revised trips.  At this time there are eight (8) new trips that need to be completed and ticketed before the paper work can be completed (reservations made and prepaid by my P-Card and advance checks made out.  Assisted several LIGO people with their travel arrangements using their P-Cards and made several reservations for outside visitors coming to LIGO/Caltech or one of the LIGO sites.
  • Completed sixteen (16) Expense Reports and there are fourteen (14) 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 these can be closed in a timely manner.  Presently there are four (4) reports more than 30 days old.  I have three (3) reports awaiting signature at this time.  Reconciled twenty-seven (27) P-Card charges for the week requiring telephoning hotels and car rental agencies to verify which traveler used my card and for what amount.

>Julie Hiroto

  • Travel reports and Pcard reconciliations and travel arrangements continue to be foremost.

>Dorothy Lloyd

  • Processed the usual invoices for payment. Tracked and followed up on invoice problems. Reviewed and recorded payments processed by Esther the week of June 20.
  • Processed requisitions for standard purchases, payment requests and change orders. For more detail see Cost Schedule Control Systems report by Ruth Brambilla.
  • Jim continued with data entry in the LIGO database and helping out in the DCC.

PROPOSALS and REPORTS (Lindquist)

LIGO must submit an Annual Report for Operations by August 1, 2005 and this annual report must be accompanied by a request for a two year extension (FY 2007 and FY 2008) as well as a justification for why Caltech/MIT should be continued in the role of management of LIGO.  We are assembling and editing the report.

DCC Steering Committee (Lindquist)

We reviewed the requirements matrix relative to three document management systems, Synergy, Xythos, and DocDB.  We are going to revise the formal version of the matrix and distribute for additional precision in some of our evaluations focusing on those areas that truly discriminate between the various applications.  We will also be setting up teleconferences to address specific questions with Xythos and Synergy.

Our next scheduled meeting will be on Wednesday, July 13, 2005.  We may attempt short ad hoc meetings with Synergy and Xythos prior to that meeting..

CHANGE CONTROL/CONTINGENCY MANAGEMENT (Lindquist)

  • CR-050006, to provide additional budget for cost/schedule/planning for Advanced LIGO during FY 2005 and FT 2006 was discussed during the Executive Committee meeting Monday, June 27, 2005.  The committee recommended approval.  Minutes have been prepared and submitted to the Deputy Director for signature (LIGO-M050215-00-P).

HUMAN RESOURCES (Akutagawa)

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

  • The next Staffing Committee meeting is scheduled for Monday, July 18
  • All files for the Staffing Committee are up-to-date and posted on the SC web page
  • Prepared numerous appointment and reappointment memos for various Visitors, Post Docs, and Term Staff.

Quality/Safety (Tyler)

>From: Bill Tyler tyler@ligo.caltech.edu

Scheduled additional Baseline eye exams and conducted LIGO safety briefings for new students and LIGO visitors.

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

Summary of Commissioning Activities at LIGO Hanford Observatory (Landry)

Early this week the replacement ITMX optic was re-hung after the bake, without incident and in good alignment on the wire.  The LVEA was transitioned to laser safe as of Tuesday night and the vent commenced Wednesday morning.  The vent time was approximately 17h, considerably longer than first envisioned.  Initial observations indicated the ITMX, ITMY and BS optics were covered in a thin film of dust.  The ITMX was swapped, and the ITMY was drag-wiped.  Both procedures were slowed by problems with static charge buildup on the optics, and some procedural items such as the difficulty of making OSEM adjustments given the current design (Adv LIGO please note).

Read more on the vent in upcoming elogs.

We are holding out for more data on the scattering and upconversion before erecting the arm cavity baffles in the end (and ultimately, mid- and corner-) stations.

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

L1 Interferometer (Frolov)

Interferometer operation in low-noise mode has mostly been recovered from previous week lightning strike and power trips. The inspiral range during last night's astrowatch was around 6 Mpc.  Noise on a 5 V power supply coupled to the interferometer output through the length and angle sensing electronics and was eliminated from the ifo spectrum by changing the voltage which goes to the voltage regulators in the crate. The cause of noise is not known yet and under investigation. The interferometer operates with two anti-symmetric port photo-detectors at the moment due to the electronics problems with the whitening board. The whitening electronics is expected to be repaired today.

Site Safety and Security (Riesen)

Nothing of substance to report this period.

LLO General Computing and LIGO Computing Security (Roddy)

As a continuation of the Snort/ACID install from last week, I found out that BASE (Basic Analysis and Security Engine) has replaced ACID and is currently under active development.  So, I installed BASE.  It is much like ACID (based on the same code) but is a bit more refined and there are several bugfixes and new features.  They are actively working on a total rewrite for v. 2.  I also installed the "bleeding-edge" snort rules from bleedingsnort.org.  This turned out to be extremely valuable. It has detection rules for spyware, ssh scans, etc.  It has increased by double the amount of detections snort sees, but the false alarm rate is very low.  Turns out we had 4 machines here infected with spyware that I did not know about which were "phoning home" many times daily.  I will end up putting together a quick howto for everyone and will likely set up a similar system for LHO.  This is a very valuable item to have on the network.

Redeployed the support.ligo-la.caltech.edu web server.

I have reinstalled the helpdesk software there and I am working on configuring it.  All of the printer, licensing, and other support info is back online.  This machine suffered a hardware failure months ago, however there was not much desire to redeploy it until recently.  Lisa would like to start using it and with the influx of support issues due to SURF students, teachers, etc. that we have here right now it will make it easier for me to track support issues again. Worked on a server for most of a day trying to troubleshoot a hardware issue.  Never was able to determine where the exact problem was.  Seems like it may be a bad CPU or a problem with the motherboard.  I will likely just mothball it or try to build a workstation out of the remaining good parts.

snort alerts in the last 24 hours:

27 ssh brute force attempts

1,869 suspected port scans

4,411 detected spyware/malware packets mostly from 2 infected hosts.

218 hits on non-allowed web pages

1,106 IIS httpd hack attempts

1 attempted trojan installation

Reinstalled a Fedora Core 3 workstation for a SURF student that was hosed due to improper package removals by their mentor.  Somehow all of the Xorg stuff got removed.  Reinstalled with a full install and apparently now the software that was required for the surf student will now compile.

HPLF, Optics Modeling, Data Analysis and L1 Commissioning (Franzen)

  • HPLF news: Have spent most time getting specifications of new high power optics from various companies. We mostly need better 2'' lenses and mirrors, i.e. optics with less coating absorption than what Thorlabs has provided us. Have order a few expensive but hopefully good ones from CVI Laser which will be tested as soon as they arrive on site. Have also confirmed that the CVI Thin Film Polarizers indeed give a polarization extinction ratio 200:1 at 100 W.
  • Have finalized a set of drawing of the mounting hardware needed for the REFL port beam tracking system together with Luke Williams from UF. After some final checking by Peter Fritschel we will submit them to the UF workshop. The manufacturing time is estimated to 10 working days. Have also started to communicate with Rich Abbott on the details of the cables, electronics and software architecture.

CDS Systems (Bogue)

  • began building a development web server as the first step in upgrading services on london.
  • built a laptop to demo the control software for the new ups.
  • worked with Rusyl on cabling problems in the mass storage room.
  • looked at the login procedure for control7.  I'm certain I can automate much of this once I get a better feel for epics.
  • wrote a start script for ndsproxy on london.
  • working with John Zweizig to get tools and a procedure in place to generate the xml file needed to change the values of the sensemon graph in the figures of merit displays.

CDS code  (Khan)

Developing a map of CDS signals so that from a topdown view a signal could be traced from its origin to its destination. I hope this mapping will help in troubleshooting hardware electronics that require instant acces to the signal flow diagram.

LDAS/Condor Sysadmin and Burst Analysis (Yakushin)

Condor/Data archiving/LDAS admin

  • Disk 9 in T3-20 failed and was replaced by disk 9 from the spare T3-13 by Tom.
  • node31 died. The problem seems to be bad memory since replacing DIMMS 1 and 2 with 3 and 4 revived node31.

Data analysis:

Presented "Status of S4 untriggered burst search" at Amaldi6 conference.

Initial LIGO Detector Science & Engineering (Coyne)

CDS

See also the CDS weekly meeting minutes in the commissioning archives

CDS Software

No report

CDS Hardware

Ben Abbott

RF photodiodes: 8 PDs have all been tested.  They need to go through final assembly, and then they can be shipped out.  This will be accomplished shortly. There are 4 tuned to 24.5 MHz, and 4 tuned to 29.5MHz.

DMT

No report

PSL

No report

Arm Cavity Baffle

Mike Smith

I am in the process of re-calculating the edge diffraction from the arm cavity baffle.

40 Meter Interferometer (Weinstein)

No report.

Thermal Noise Interferometer (Black)

Helena: The mirrors have arrived!

Jay: Installed the daq at the TNI and showed it to Kate.

Akira: Found one source of electronic noise in the bond-noise experiment and reduced it. Helped teach SURF students how to align and lock the TNI.

Chinyere: While waiting on the new mirrors, learned how to align and lock the TNI, and how to take closed-loop transfer function measurements in both the (relatively simple) reference cavity system and the (much more complex) TNI. She is now reading Bode's original paper on gain-phase relationships and stability in control systems.  She also read a paper on Pound-Drever locking and modeled the error signal in MATLAB, before the other SURF students arrived.

LASTI (Ottaway)

No report.

Data Analysis and Computing (Lazzarini)

Simulation and Modeling (Bhawal)

Simulation activities

(Biplab)

  • Doug Fettig, SURF student has started using SimLIGO to study the effects of possible offsets in transverse positions of mirrors or beam.
  • Helped Sany Yoshida and his students at LLO in simulation of the Input Optics system and various issues related to SimLIGO model.

Alfi

(Bruce) Continuing work on major upgrade of iLog entry creation tool.

(Melody) Continuing with fixing the Problem Reports (PRs). Finished working on PR 448 - don't allow blank port input settings. Now working on PR 483 -"check into new way to display java remotely"

Data Analysis Activities (Lazzarini)

Charlton:

  • At the request of Joe Romano and John Whelan, I've made a set of "local" test scripts for the stochastic pipeline in the matapps CVS archive. This is to provide a way of verifying that the stochastic pipeline code is built and that all settings are correct in the user's local environment, without having to refer to the test data stored in the sgwb CVS archive.
  • Have also worked on my matlab & C code for chirplet decomposition of GW signals, mainly on improving the methods for estimating the chirplet parameters (frequency, chirp rate, amplitude) for real signals.

Chatterji:

I have updated and made the following software packages available in the Matlab CVS repository:

Studying the prospects of applying the Q Pipeline to auxiliary and environmental channel data for the purpose of detector characterization and vetoing.  Currently working on trigger production for environmental channels during the S3 run.

Continued working with Sahand Hormoz (SURF) to implement an extension of the Q pipeline to target a specific position on the sky.  We are currently developing prototype code to understand the issues involved in such a search.

Mendell:

StackSlide work has been on the backburner for a week. I have been working with a SURF student to understand the calibration near the Free Spectral Range Frequency for a project with Rick Savage and Malik Rakhmanov. I also met with Sukanta Bose and students and postdocs from Washington State University to discuss building a closer collaboration with the work at LHO. Finally, I have been helping edit web pages that will give a scientific overview of the work done by Einstein@Home. These web pages were presented by Bruce Allen at the last LSC meeting, and have now been sent to the CW review committee.  They will be approved by the executive committee before going public. Joe Betzwieser and I will be getting back to using the StackSlide code to analyze the S4 data next week.

Searle(visiting from ANU)

Implemented colored noise null stream method; results consistent with expectations; algorithm substantially slower due to per-frequency-bin construction of the null streams.  Explored Shurov's simulated data and matlab applications from the new LIGOtools release.  (One small thing to note is that MATLAB's default PSD windowing is completely unsuitable for IFO PSDs due to massive leakage.)  Broke up null stream implementation to return detector square- and cross-terms separately.  Shows that "butterfly" features due solely to square terms and rings due solely to cross-terms.

However, must be recombined for global extremum to be the source position--rings are ambiguous otherwise.  Planned for 'production' implementation by Leo, with Patrick, Shurov and Massimo.

Sutton:

Since returning from Canada, I have been meeting with Stein, Tinto, Searle, and Chatterji for the network bursts analysis project.

Yakushin:

Presented "Status of S4 untriggered burst search" at Amaldi6 conference.

Zanolin:

  • spent time debugging the compiled jobs of the parameter estimation that were crashing on the MIT cluster.
  • worked with Jarred and Peter on the study of the resolution of a network of interferometers based on time and amplitude estimation
  • worked on the review of Waveburst version 5

LIGO Data Analysis System

Software Systems (Blackburn)

LDAS development systems were shutdown for two days this week to resolve an email issue that resulted from combining all the /scratch filesystems into one common filesystem and to all the system administrators to also experiment with a second change to the file- systems to share /export from QFS which revealed several configuration issues with QFS that prevented LDAS from running jobs. Both issues associated with the two file system changes have been resolved to the point that LDAS can be run successfully again, although we are seeing a performance degradation after these change of about 10 percent.

The swig wrapped function getFrameNumber has been restored.  It will only operate on frame files that have a table of contents. If the frame file does not have a table of contents, then an exception is thrown (PR#2846).

Reworked the documentation describing the swig wrapped functionn DetectorProc2container to explicately warn the developer not to release the frame file pointer before making this call as the DetectorProc pointer is shallow (PR#2845).

Corrected the code for creating RDSs to explicately check for non-NULL FrRawData pointer. This allows for the generation of RDSs when the frame only has FrProcData elements (PR#2848).

Reworked many of the test scripts to make better use of the /scratch/test/frames file system. Each of the tandem systems now has its own directory for create RDS commands that want to write to the /scratch file system (/scratch/test/system/tandem-{i-v}).

This resolved the issue with the /scratch file system change by LDAS system admins which resulted in the 60000 emails being sent out by LDAS over the past weekend.

Attempted to fix a memory leak in the dataConditionAPI by adding call-chain clean up code to the Tcl layer. This fixed the leaking of call-chain objects but introduced a four times larger leak of element objects. The call-chain fix will need to be backed out until a better solution can be found.

Added email blocking code to the controlMonitorAPI so that no emails will be sent out from any of the LDAS Tandem systems where experimental code is first tested.

Updated documentation to provide instructions on all user command tests, node tests and search user tests.

Conducted system and integration testing on LDAS build 1.6.24. No issues with test results. Continued developing frame-2-ilwd test.

TCLGLOBUS:

The 0.2.0 alpha release of LDAS is being made available today to the LSC. It support both Globus Toolkit 3.2 and Globus Toolkit 4.0, as well as Redhat 9 and Fedora Core 3.  The distribution is available as source and RPMs for GT3.2 and as source for GT4.

OSG-GRIDS:

Successfully configured Condor high-throughput job manager on the osg-itb cluster including the head node and seven worker nodes.

Performed limited testing of Condor jobs in the Condor vanilla environment.

Fixed boot scripts so head node of osg-itb starts up daemons for Globus gatekeeper, gsiftp, MonALISA, MIS-CI, Ganglia, and Condor.  Configured ganglia web front-end so that cluster node performance charts can be reviewed at URL: http://osg-itb.ligo.caltech.edu/ganglia/index.php

Installed GUMS software on osg-itb and began reviewing the detailed configuration documentation.

Also, PSU has registered as the OSG VO for LIGO and begun the process of setting up a VOMS server for LIGO which will allow for simplier management of user certs on all grid resources.

Discussed strategies at this week's LSC Computer Committee Teleconference for the LSC's participation in the annouced solicitation for pre-proposals to the OSG.

Hardware Systems (Anderson)

Caltech

(Dan Kozak)

  • Double checked what really happens when zero byte files are archived in SAM (answer: the tar file on tape has a header for the file with path/perms but no data).
  • Had Sun/STK replace failing 9940 (Case ID: 64631496).
  • Dealt with 3510 controller failure (replaced with spare controller, did integrity check of files).
  • Got Sun to replace 3510 disks/controller (still one disk outstanding).
  • Did some work on getting a reliable (s)du utility, but GNU du turns out to be hard to modify for our purposes.  Getting Sun to supply a working sdu seems the better course.
  • Converted ldas-dev:/export to QFS and worked on pursuing the problems that ensued.
  • Helped CACR shut down all HPSS hardware.
  • Continued working on getting all data synchronized between the observatories and CIT.  LHO's postS3 is now synched with CIT.

(Phil Ehrens)

  • Installed Fedora Core 4 on ldasdatatest1, both /raid0 and /raid1 are reiserfs 3.6
  • Installed Fedora Core 4 on another desktop machine for a SURF student.
  • Updated svn repository to include all current scripts and config data on numerous machines.
  • Updated desktop machine config scripts - separated generic desktop rules from grid specific rules and added verbose progress commentary to scripts.

(Stuart Anderson)

  • Idenetified and deplyed a Linux kernel patch that is needed on the LDAS-CIT cluster head nodes to access files NFS mounted from SAM-QFS that need to be staged. The necessary patch is part of Fedora Core 4, so desktop machines are being upgraded to FC4.
  • Investigated QFS multi-reader/writer leases and their impact on running LDAS directly on a shared QFS filesystem.
  • Helped with SAM-QFS RAID controller failure. I believe we now have a solid understanding of how to replace and controllers in both the single and dual controller 3510/3511 units.
  • Moved additional cluster home directories over to SAM-QFS at Caltech.
  • Investigating apparent discrepancies in disk allocations as reported by ls -l, du -s, sdu -k, and sdu -h.

Livingston

(Igor Yakushin)

  • Disk 9 in T3-20 failed and was replaced by disk 9 from the spare T3-13 by Tom.
  • node31 died. The problem seems to be bad memory since replacing DIMMS 1 and 2 with 3 and 4 revived node31.

Hanford

(Greg Mendell)

  • Getting quotes for the power and AC upgrade, and installing grid tools for Solaris on the GC network.
  • Ben Johnson is on vacation until July 11, and I will be handling all LDAS sys admin tasks for the week.  Ben has set up a couple of useful web pages. One that shows how to access S4 data using LSCdataFind is here.

One that shows available tape space in the archive at LHO is here

General Computing (Wallace)

MIT:

(Keith)

  • Spec'ing workstation for CAD/FAE simulations
  • Working on spamd filter program
  • Added urop Britt Baugher to gc
  • Removed several past year urops from gc

Livingston:

(Shannon)

  • As a continuation of the Snort/ACID install from last week, I found out that BASE (Basic Analysis and Security Engine) has replaced ACID and is currently under active development.  So, I installed BASE.  It is much like ACID (based on the same code) but is a bit more refined and there are several bugfixes and new features.  They are actively working on a total rewrite for v. 2.  I also installed the "bleeding-edge" snort rules from bleedingsnort.org.  This turned out to be extremely valuable.  It has detection rules for spyware, ssh scans, etc.  It has increased by double the amount of detection's snort sees, but the false alarm rate is very low.  Turns out we had 4 machines here infected with spyware that I did not know about which were "phoning home" many times daily.  I will end up putting together a quick howto for everyone and will likely set up a similar system for LHO.  This is a very valuable item to have on the network.
  • Redeployed the support.ligo-la.caltech.edu web server.  I have reinstalled the helpdesk software there and I am working on configuring it.  All of the printer, licensing, and other support info is back online.  This machine suffered a hardware failure months ago, however there was not much desire to redeploy it until recently.  Lisa would like to start using it and with the influx of support issues due to SURF students, teachers, etc. that we have here right now it will make it easier for me to track support issues again.
  • Worked on a server for most of a day trying to troubleshoot a hardware issue.  Never was able to determine where the exact problem was.  Seems like it may be a bad CPU or a problem with the motherboard.  I will likely just mothball it or try to build a workstation out of the remaining good parts.
  • snort alerts in the last 24 hours:

27 ssh brute force attempts

1,869 suspected port scans

4,411 detected spyware/malware packets mostly from 2 infected hosts.

218 hits on non-allowed web pages

1,106 IIS httpd hack attempts

1 attempted trojan installation

  • Reinstalled a Fedora Core 3 workstation for a SURF student that was hosed due to improper package removals by their mentor.  Somehow all of the Xorg stuff got removed.  Reinstalled with a full install and apparently now the software that was required for the surf student will now compile.

Hanford:

(Christine)

  • Network usage can be seen at http://www.ligo-wa.caltech.edu/~christin/mrtg/198.129.208.1_198.129.78.122.html
  • Working a little bit with Greg and Ben trying to setup LSC data grid and some of the other LSC analysis tools to run on Solaris.
  • Misc. user support.

CIT:

(Mike)

  • -Setup additional CIT accounts for visitors plus setup workstations for these guests.
  • -NTSRV: Ghost server crashed. Called Dell, and this server is out of warrantee! Ran diagnostics with Dell, and got no where. I ended taking this computer a part, and reseat all the hardware. I lucked out, and now have this server backup and running. It looks like the motherboard might be going out.
  • -Loaded two sun boxes, one for a DHCP server, and another for testing purposes. This is still an on going project.
  • -Mail Server: Spent a lot of time this week working with Larry monitoring our mail server. Things seem to be quieting down for now, and we are still keeping a close eye on this.
  • -Server maintenance: Freeing up some space on some of the servers. All disks are getting pretty full.
  • -Christian Cepeda: Worked a lot with Christian showing him around CIT where all our work is located West Bridge, East Bridge, Bridge Annex, Millikan, Wilson House, 40Meter, Downs, and Synchrotron. Showing him on how we do our PC builds, security settings, and other sys admin tasks.
  • -Worked in the G/C server room setting up the air conditioning, and monitoring the temperature making sure it didn't get to hot in there while the water for our cooling system was shutdown for testing purposes.  Everything went well.
  • -Other misc. onsite/phone user support.

(Veronica)

  • LSC:  Working on the setup of the credit card submit form for the August meeting.  Updates to the meeting website.  Updates to the LSC 'papers under review' pages.
  • LIGO:  Roster database updates.  Finished the mirror pages for www.ligo.mit.edu and installed them into a default location.
  • CaJAGWR:  Support for the Executive Committee elections.
  • Served jury duty for two days this week.

(Bruce)

(BS) Ilog Development:                               (4.0 days)

  • Continuing work on major upgrade of iLog entry  creation tool.

(Larry)

  • -Continuing the work with the SURF students. Most have arrived and their accounts are up and running. Specialty needs are now being addressed on a case by case basis.
  • -Setup a couple of Fedora core 3 and core 4 boxes. The install scripts do save a lot of time. A few modifications need to be made to eliminate some services no longer needed but over all the present setup configuration is working well.
  • -Worked a number of procurement issues. Still have a number of items to order and waiting delivery for a couple of computers.
  • -Worked a number of data transfers and file restorations for different people.
  • -Still moving equipment around in the computer room and different offices.
  • Once the E2E units are all working and put into place the office moves should diminish.
  • -Updated a couple of licenses. Thanks to Philip Charlton getting some license information the Maple license has been updated on one of the sandbox units.
  • -Working with Mike on setting up a couple of Solaris units.
  • -The mailserver took a pretty good hit and is still having some minor issues from the fallout. A few items will need to be adjusted but things are calming down on the service. The problem was a large amount of e-mail hitting the server over a short period of time caused a few functions to fail and a cascading affect on different services.

Mail Statistics

June 23-29, 2005

Rejected Messages

14,985

Virus Messages

1,186

False Positives

199

Accepted Messages

104,649

Total Messages

119,634

 

Advanced LIGO and Supporting R&D (Shoemaker)

Systems

from Dennis Coyne

See also:

AL Systems web page

AL Systems email archives

Records Of Decision or Agreement (RODA)

See also the RODA status web page

  • nothing new

Requirements

  • nothing new

Interface Issues

See the "Interfaces" section of the AL Systems web page

  • Continuing to work on completing the draft set of Interface Control Documents (ICDs) for the SUS/UK scope
  • Completed a draft ICD between SUS/UK and ISC This is a "chapter" of the overall ICD, E030647
  • Pending and soon to be released: SUS/UK to ISC, INS, SYS

Vacuum Compatibility & Preparation

Residual Gas Assay (RGA)

See also the Vacuum Bake Lab

Bob Taylor

  • Working on the design of the OSEM harnesses for the Quad suspension. He will have the upper mass harness done by the end of next week.
  • Continuing to build OSEMs for the Quad suspension.
  • Begain organizing and rearanging the items in the clean room in preporation for incoming suspention parts.
  • The new Large Air Bake Oven has arrived in good shape. I have Inspected it and will set the installation procedure in motion today. It probably will actually go in the room on Wed. or Thurs. of next week.

 

High-Irradiance, Contamination-Exposure Cavities

Lee Cardenas, Liyuan Zhang

 

Cavity

(Location)

Material/Item

Start

End

Comments

Cavity #1

(OTF Lab, Bridge)

MMG nickel plated Nd-B-Fe magnets (Helena Armandula, SUS )

~6/8

TBD

Added 40 small Nd-B-Fe magnets into the cavity

Cavity #2

(OTF Lab, Lauritsen)

NA

NA

NA

No Change

cavity is close to being ready for samples

Cavity #3

(OTF Lab, Lauritsen)

OSEM emitter & photodiode 40 of each, (Dennis Coyne, SUS )

~6/10

~9/10

No Change So far the ring down & absorption measurements indicate that there is no change.

Queue

Priority 1

2 Cleaned 50ppm transmission mirrors, 1 in dia., REO coated --

TBD

TBD

witness samples for the LHO vertex volume (added in 6/29/2005 vent)

Queue

Priority 2

OSEM Flexi-circuit cable, qty ~ 45

(Helena Armandula, SUS)

To be supplied by Univ. Birmingham (Stuart Aston); Helena is finding out date

TBD

TBD

DuPont Flexible Circuits. The whole part to be constructed of 'flexi' i.e. no 'rigid' sections. (Stuart Aston,Univ. of Birmingham, SUS/UK subsystem)
- Start Laminate: Kapton (LF8515)

(document link: http://www.dupont.com/fcm/products/H-73244.pdf

Coverlay (x2): Kapton (LF0110)

(document link: http://www.dupont.com/fcm/products/H-73245.pdf

DuPont Pyralux Series - Kapton / Acrylic Adhesive system.

(document link: http://www.dupont.com/fcm/products/H-73246.pdf

 

Queue

Priority 3

Stepper Motor (Riccardo DeSalvo, possible SUS or ISC use)

TBD

TBD

Stepper Motor sample had been placed into Cavity #1: Power dropped from 175 mW to ~25 mW after introducing the stepper motor sample, and continues to decrease. It is very hard to keep cavity locked. The stepper motor may have contaminated the mirrors. Will re-test when a cvity becomes available again.

 

Large Item Cleaning Plan/Facility

Ken Mailand

  • The bake oven finished testing and has shipped via ABF trucking, expect arrival early next week.

Meetings & Reviews

  • Future near term planned meetings & reviews are indicated in the table below.
  • Only Change since last week: SEI review committee meeting 7/7

 

Date

Subsys

Review

Topic(s)

Enabling event(s)

Schedule motivation

 

Jul 7
8:30-10:30 PT

SEI

BSC Critical Design Review 3

review basic requirements, interfaces & dynamic coupling

available analysis/reports

timely decision on proceeding with SEI/BSC prototype for LASTI for integration with the SUS quad prototype

 scheduled

Jul 11-13

SYS

SYS Mtg

CDS Infrastructure & HAM Isolation Requirements

 

 

scheduled

12-Jul
8-11 PT

SUS

PDR, Review 2

Electronics req & design; Focus is on the front end electronics (UK) -- limited Digital controls/electronics (US) review

 

 

scheduled

Jul 19
8-10 PT

ISC/40m

40m DC Readout Review

DC readout experiment

 

 

scheduled

~Aug, 05

SEI

HAM Critical Design Review

Recommendations w.r.t. HAM prototype development based on ETF results

Completion of SEI/BSC critical design reviews; LSC review of ASI HAM configuration design

timely decision on proceeding with SEI/HAM prototype

 

~Sep

SUS

PDR, Review 3

Quad design

Completion of the quad controls prototype assembly;

timely transfer, to RAL & UB efforts, of lessons learned from the controls prototype

 

~Nov

SUS

PDR, Review 4

Quad Installation

Completion of installation at LASTI

Inform the UK final design & noise prototype design effort ASAP

 

~Dec

SUS

PDR, Review 5

Triple design

Available SUS/US staff

Enable SUS/US final design phase

 

~Feb

SUS

PDR, Review 6

quad controls prototype test results
ribbon process/design

completion of LASTI testing

timely incorporation into final design effort on the noise prototype

 

TBD

SUS

PDR, Review 7

BS, FM/ITM SUS design
RM design
non-cavity SUS

design work completion (has yet to start on FM/ITM, not mature for RM)

 

 

Sep

AOS

Stray Light Control, DRR/CD

 

SYS PDR?

primavera late finish 6/15/05

 

TBD

AOS

Thermal Comp., DRR/CD

 

SYS PDR?

 

 

~Oct

SYS

PDR, Review 1

Engineering & Implementation ('generic') Requirements;
Interfaces
Revised Optical Layout
Optomechanical Layout

completion of generic requirements definition; completion of first draft of ICD; revision to optical layout; establish integrated opto-mechanical equipment layout

timely system level definition enables/helps define subsystem reqmnts & design

 

~Dec

SYS

PDR, Review 2

CDS Infrastructure
Stable Recycling Cavities
Lock Acquisition
Modulation Scheme
Power Induced Instability

Sufficient CDS requirements & concept work (also 7/11-13 mtg)
E2E Modeling for AL
40m Progress on Acq. & Mod.

CDS Infrastructure is key to subsystem electronics req.
Stable cavity is key to IO MMT design

 

~Sep

IO

PDR Review 1

Faraday Isolator

SYS PDR?

 

 

~Jan

IO

PDR Review 2

Electro-Optic Modulator

 

 

 

~Mar

IO

PDR Review 3

Mode Matching Telescope

Determination of whether a stable recycling cavity will become part of the AL baseline

 

 

TBD

COC

PDR

 

SYS PDR?

 

 

Seismic Isolation

From: Ken Mason kmason@ligo.mit.edu

Advanced LIGO Seismic Structure

SEI Structure:

We have good results from the Nastran model of the BSC structure at LASTI. We are now adding the concrete floor and vacuum chamber to see their effect on the rest of the structure.

Quotes for the SEI/SUS test stand from Southbridge Sheet Metal and Lavallee Machine have been recieved. The last quote from HT Machine is expected early next week.

Brian Lantz presented the results of his work on softening the ISI blades. Joe and Oddvar will verify the new blades fit into the existing design with no major modifications before we ask ASI to make the design changes.

Suspension

From: Janeen Romie romie_j@ligo.caltech.edu

Advanced LIGO Suspensions

Working on the LASTI MC spacer design. We'll utilize the structure shim and make associated parts that will bolt to the shim to speed delivery to LASTI. Dave Ottaway provided me an optic specification for the dummy mass for the quad controls prototype and I've put in a purchase order for it. This optic will fit in the metal mass for LASTI. It has a 4 week lead time.

Working on some issues for Carol.

Provided feedback to Dennis on an ICD of his.

Met with Ian and Tim this morning about noise prototype issues.

Gin Gin

Answered some questions about the SOS suspension for Bram.

From: ctorrie <ctorrie@ligo.caltech.edu>

Advanced LIGO Suspensions

QUAD ETM CONTROLS PTYPE.

Please reference the following link for photos of some of this weeks work

http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/~ctorrie/pictures/QUADJULY2005-02/QuadJULY2005-02.html

Most of the structural components are due either today or on the 5th of July. The upper structure has ~ 1 week of post welding work to be done. Before this can be started it will firstly go into an oven for 6 hours at 350 F (stress relief). This should be completed by July 5th.

VISITS

Tim Hayler is visiting form RAL next week for 7 days. Ian Wilmut and one of the designers is visiting from RAL on the 13th of July for 7 days.

QUAD ETM NOISE PROTOTYPE.

I have been preparing the upper and lower structure assemblies on the PDMWorks vault to allow RAL to have access to our as built configuration. RAL have prepared 2 technical notes associated with lessons learned from the controls prototype and we are reviewing these with them.

MEETING

No design meeting this week. We met instead to discuss the overall assembly of the quad ETM controls prototype. This will be released to the Vault later this week.

From: Ken Mailand kmailand@ligo.caltech.edu

The LIGO large part bake oven: expect arrival Thursday 6-30.

Making a S/W layout of the end station and photon calibrator beam clearances; also simplified S/W drawings of the Adv. LIGO optical component assemblies for import to Zmax, for Mike Smith.

From: Jay Heefner <jay@ligo.caltech.edu>

AdL SUS and SEI

  • Continued to work on the vacuum system cable design for AdL SUS and AdL SEI.
  • Started layout schematics for the CIT and LASTI quad controls prototype tests.
  • Started layout schematics for LASTI AdL SEI controls.

Core Optics

From: Bill Kells <kells@ligo.caltech.edu>

The Australians are here now and we have commenced ongoing discussions on the parametric instability. I have got some initial results on running the FFT code to resonate HTMs in arms so that the true, self consistent, loss of such modes (due to finite mirror dia.) can be determined (a crucial parameter in calculating the parametric instability thresholds). We aim at reconciling these and other parameters with what the Australians have been using in publications: attempting to get a consistent statement for the AdL config.

Another aim of mine is to go over their recent writings in enough detail to fairly referee one of them (which P. Saulson has asked me to do).

Pre-Stabilized Laser

From: Peter King pking@ligo.caltech.edu

No report this week

Auxiliary Optics

From: Michael Smith smith@ligo.caltech.edu

OPTLEV

Aabeg has completed thin lens and thick lens models of the OPTLEV receiver using ABCD matrix formulation.  I am awaiting help from Ben Abbot for the QPD readout.

SLC

I was able to insert an IGES model of the quad SUS as a CAD object into my Zemax non-sequential ray model of the LIGO Vertex. The SUS can be viewed as a wire-frame model or as a shaded solid.  Shasta has almost completed the assembly of the BRDF apparatus.

TCS

Ken M. is helping me create a Solid Works model of the conceptual ring heater and the elliptical baffle to be attached to the quad SUS.

Other Laboratory R&D

From: Riccardo DeSalvo desalvo@ligo.caltech.edu

Juri

I used my modified version of Bench2 to study the optimization of Advanced LIGO in order to take full advantage of the lower thermal noise using Flat Top beams. I’m writing the proceedings for the SPIE conference where I will present the status of our Mexican Hat cavity prototype.

Anamaria and David:

So far we have been trying to set up the four systems of maraging, Cu-Be, LM001 and LM002. We are designing an excitation method that will excite the 4 systems identically at the same time (probably an electromagnet). And we are waiting for the LVDT's and glassy metal blades to arrive. We will measure the Q factor behavior of the 4 metals for comparison.

John

Due to the works in the lab most of this week was spent computing.  I finalized the design of the improved mode-matching telescope though at present Marco and I have decided not to implement it. We are currently experimenting with a ‘top hat’ input beam created by focussing only the central part of a large Gaussian beam (over which the intensity should be relatively constant). This technique showed promising results yesterday. We saw some of the best profiles to date, however a clear fundamental still eludes us. We also noticed that as the resonances of the cavity become stronger the distance between modes decreases.  I have also been developing Matlab code to filter noise from 2D experimental profiles and perform a non-linear fit. Once complete this should allow quick comparisons with theory. So far my investigation has been limited to data taken when the cavity used spherical mirrors; I hope to extend this analysis to MH data this week.

Chiara

I'm working on new mechanical set-up to test our horizontal attenuation system in order to measure its transfer function, I’m changing the actuator used to shake the system, and the supports for soft springs attached under the table. 

Riccardo

Back from Amaldi,

Please find our presentations and the draft of the first paper:

Justin and Sean,

This week we have been reviewing the both the experimental procedure and the data analysis for finding the Q factor in the newly designed flex joints. Next week we will begin the testing of the single crystal silicon flex joints. We will also be preparing for the experiments that must be completed under vacuum.

Francesca

I arrived to Caltech last week.  In order to make my project I'm studiyng Lab View and Maddalena's thesis.

For additional information about this report, contact S. Whitcomb or P. Lindquist