Weekly Report for Week Ending July 07, 2005



The LIGO Executive Committee Agenda for Monday Jul7 11, 2005 will be:

(Meeting time: 10:30 am Pacific Time)  

  1. Announcements
  2. Comments on Weekly Report
  3. LSC Issues (Saulson)
  4. LIGO Lab Operations
      • Administration (Lindquist)
      • Sites (Raab, Zucker, Shoemaker)
      • Commissioning (Fritschel), Detector (Coyne)
      • Campus Research Facilities
        1. 40 Meter (Weinstein)
        2. TN, ( Libbrecht)
        3. LASTI  (Shoemaker)
      • Data Analysis and Computing (Lazzarini)
  5. R&D and Advanced LIGO (Shoemaker)
  6. CHANGE CONTROL BOARD/TECHNICAL REVIEW BOARD SESSION AS NEEDED

Special Items:


Special Announcements:

 


Weekly Report Highlights


LSC Issues (Saulson)


No report


LIGO Laboratory Administration (Lindquist)


STATUS OF LSC MOUs (Lindquist)

  • No report.

Non-LSC MOUs (Lindquist)

  • No report.

SITE TELECONFERENCE (Lindquist)

  • We held a site teleconference on Thursday, July 07, 2005.  The following were among the items discussed:
  • Operating Budgets and Actual Costs—The financial reports for the end of June have been published.  Analyses continue to project a spending rate of about $30 million for the fiscal year plus the anticipated end-of-year “spike” of commitments for data analysis system hardware and seismic isolation equipment that is expected to push total costs to the funding level.
  • Livingston Science Education Center—The bid documents have been released.  The pre-bid conference is scheduled for the afternoon of July 14 and will be followed by a site walk.  E. Jasnow will attend.  An analysis has been completed comparing anticipated actual costs and commitments against available funding.  This information will be presented to Caltech.
  • TechMart Training—TechMart training has been conducted at Hanford with success to be determined (Haford’s concern over the system relates more to the issue of prompt payment of vendor invoices.)  Training for Livingston has not yet been scheduled.
  • 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>

  • No report.

DOCUMENT CONTROL CENTER (Turner, Mak)

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

  • No report—Vacation.

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

  • Continued with organizing/processing of MOU's and Progress Reports.
  • Activity for week ending 07/07/05:

 

In

Out

Packages

8

5

Faxes

6

10

FINANCIAL SYSTEMS (Cunningham, Brambila, Kaufman)

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

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

  • Completed the license upgrade to Solsoft. The vendor has submitted the order acknowledgement.
  • Completed the change order to Ares Corporation and routing it for approvals today.
  • Working on the change order to Raytheon.
  • Working on the change order for Tyler.

>From: Florence Kaufman <fkaufman>

  • All monthly financial reports as of the end of June have been prepared and sent out.
  • Created a new report for Advanced LIGO tasks. This report excludes labor and related charges to allow for wider dissemination of the report.
  • 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 construction of the LLO Science Education Center was released on Tuesday, July 5.  The current schedule calls for a pre-bid conference/job walk on Thursday, July 14, and bid opening on Wednesday, August 3.
  • The first session of training on the new TechMart system was held at LHO.  The training was conducted from Caltech using Webex technology.  Ten LHO staff members were trained, with the remaining staff scheduled for the second session scheduled for Tuesday, July 12.
  • Training classes on TechMart will be scheduled for LLO in the next two weeks.
  • Current projections indicate that we will only need authorization to award contracts beyond our funding limit at the time of award of the LLO SEC construction contract.  Actual expenditures should allow us to fund everything necessary prior to the next increment of funding on the Outreach Cooperative Agreement.

SUPPORT (Baldon, Hiroto, Lloyd)

>Irene Baldon

  • Processed the paper work for six (6) new/revised trips.  At this time there are two (2) 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 ten (10) Expense Reports and there are thirteen (13)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 zero (0) reports awaiting signature at this time.  Reconciled fourteen (14) 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 jhiroto@ligo.caltech.edu

  • Assist with new arrivals of LIGO SURF students.
  • Continued work on upcoming travel arrangements for Barry and reconciled previous travel reimbursements.

>Dorothy Lloyd

  • No report (we are in the process of transferring responsibility for the LSC MOUs).
  • 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 annual report.  A first draft of the budget and proposal for FY 2007 and 2008 has been entered into FastLane and provided to management for comment/adjustments.

DCC Steering Committee (Lindquist)

Our next scheduled meeting will be on Wednesday, July 13, 2005.

CHANGE CONTROL/CONTINGENCY MANAGEMENT (Lindquist)

  • CR-050006, to provide additional budget for cost/schedule/planning for Advanced LIGO during FY 2005 and FT 2006 has been approved and the signed copy submitted to the document control center (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
  • No special activities to report.

Quality/Safety (Tyler)

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

No report.


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


Summary of Commissioning Activities at LIGO Hanford Observatory (Sigg)

Due to the vent last week and the ongoing pump down the commissioning activities this week were fairly limited. The old 4K ITMX was sent back to Caltech for further investigation. The vacuum pressure in the 4K vertex is currently around 6-7 x 10^-7 torr.

We had a short period where we closed the gate valves to the arms and opened the gate valves of the 4K vertex to check the alignment of ITMX with its optical level. To reach the old alignment the resistors in the bias module had to be changed to lower values. The 4K is currently locked in PRM.

The 80 Hz bump in the 2K spectra could be made worse by increasing the acoustic noise near ISCT10---indicating that there is an acoustic coupling path near the anti-symmetric port.  (http://blue.ligo-wa.caltech.edu/ilog/pub/ilog.cgi?group=detector&date_to_view=07/02/2005&anchor_to_scroll_to=2005:07:02:17:21:30-robert)


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


*** Hurricane bulletin: ***

We are monitoring Hurricane Dennis as it enters the gulf and are making preparations for LLO site shutdown and evacuation if (and only if) forecasts warrant. We will issue announcements to ligo-all as needed; your forbearance and cooperation with evacuation orders, if any, will be greatly appreciated.

--Mike

Summary of Commissioning Activities at LIGO Livingston Observatory (Sigg)

L1 Interferometer (Frolov)

There was another five minute power outage during the last weekend due to the storm. The interferometer low noise operation was recovered after the storm but the sensitivity was a factor of two to three below the nominal performance.

The trouble shooting of the electronics problem related and unrelated to the power outage continued most of the week. The list of included the LSC whitening electronics, transmission monitor electronics, optical lever laser, and 5V power supply regulators.

The interferometer calibration was performed on Thursday and Friday.  The calibration parameters are consistent with the ones obtained before and after the S4 science run within a few percent.

In attempt to improve the Mode Cleaner visibility several optics on the Mode Cleaner optical table were replaced with the optics that have the correct polarization.  The number of optic elements was also reduced. The visibility of the Mode Cleaner did not improve after this rework.

Site Safety and Security (Riesen)

no report

LLO General Computing and LIGO Computing Security (Roddy)

Most of this week has been spent working on cleaning spyware out of PCs still.  One PC was infected so badly that I will have to reload it.  The user only needs email and web browsing capability so I am considering loading Linux on it.  This will solve the virus and spyware issues on that PC while still allowing the user to email and web browse.

Thinking about how to get some useable statistics out of snort.  It is providing lots of information but I do not have an easy way to share this information.  It may involve purchasing a commercial software package if I can not find an OSS alternative.

Since 6/30/05:

SSH brute force scans:  7,343

TCP port scans:  ~3,950

web related alerts:  8,674 (many false alarms)

trojan/virus alerts:  1,241

There was some activity on the network recently that needs to be addressed.  I have the MAC address of the person (00:90:f5:29:7f:81) but I have not been able to identify the owner of the laptop.

Working on updating the support web page now that it is back up.  All of the printer docs will change once I have relocated the printers to new IP addresses.

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

HPLF news: Received three new high power optics from CVI Laser. Started to test them but noticed a 10 % drop in output power of the laser. After some testing I also noticed that the power also exhibited a fluctuation level higher than usual. Shut down the experiment and packed the laser, which is now waiting for FedEx to pick it up for shipping back to the IPG engineers, who will evaluate the status.

REFL port beam stabilization system: Due to some issues with the design of the Piezo Jena PZT vacuum compatible cabling, the estimated delivery time has been set back to late August. The design of the mounting hardware is ready and will be submitted to the workshop within short.

Mechanical Engineering (Spjeld)

AdL Quad SUS Installation Fixtures

  • Working on manufacturing drawings for quote
  • Looking at clearance and tolerance issues

AdL SEI Engineering

  • Studying the effects on system hardware if stage 0-1 blade changes
  • Started to load ASI release documents into PDMWorks vault

LIGO Outreach Building - Pendulum Exhibit

  • Working on design illustrations
  • Working on manufacturing drawings for quote

General Engineering

  • Fit-checked mock-up HAM door removal tool in LLO LVEA
  • Design changes of tooling after fit-check nearly complete

DMT Systems (Evans)

We have received two new DMT/GDS servers, and are going to mount one in the Mass Storage Room and the other in the Computer User's Room. The one in the Computer User's Room will be on the GC network.

CDS Systems (Bogue)

Lisa is on travel this week.

CDS code  (Khan)

1)      Developed a diagnostic tool to monitor the functionality of the front-end controllers.

2)      Prepared a concise procedure for bringing up the CDS controllers after a power outage situation.

3)      Continued work on the mapping of the CDS signals.

LDAS/Condor Sysadmin and Burst Analysis (Yakushin)

Condor/Data archiving/LDAS admin:

1)      Bought 16 512Mb spare memory DIMMs. In particular, one or two DIMMs will be needed to fix node31.

2)      We had a few minute power outage at LLO last week. UPS kept all the servers and storage alive through the outage. Only the nodes were rebooted. Couple nodes did not restart automatically and had to be booted manually. After the outage, there was a problem with LDAS which might or might not be related (createRDS jobs were crashing). Restarting LDAS fixed the problem. However, several days later, diskcacheAPI started misbehaving again: frame queries and createRDS jobs would not run. Restarting diskcacheAPI fixed the problem for now.

Data analysis:

  • Processing LIGO-VIRGO simulated data using quadruple coincidence version of waveburst. At first glance, there appears to be a problem in the timing of injections into Virgo resampled channel (the actual timing seems to be somewhat different from the declared one). Might be a problem in MDC frames or in post production scripts.
  • Processing SG18 low frequency sine-gaussian injections and SG19 high frequency sine-gaussian injections for S4 LIGO burst analysis.

Initial LIGO Detector Science & Engineering (Coyne)


from Dennis Coyne

CDS

see also the CDS weekly meeting minutes in the commissioning archives

CDS Software

no report

CDS Hardware

Ben Abbott

1)      8 PDs are fully assembled and tested.  These are all being boxed up to ship out today to Hanford.  These are the last of the first group of Photodiodes.

2)      A second flock of photodiodes is underway which will provide the last few photodiodes needed by the sites, according to the original list, and a few extras for spare spares.  The photodiodes that are still needed are: 33.3MHz for Hanford, 24.5MHz for Livingston, and a 48.9MHz for Livingston.  There is also a functional 61.2MHz PD here that is destined for Livingston, but Rana and I are still tuning it.

3)      All of the machine shop parts are in now, and the boxes are being sent out for their machining later today.

4)      I'm still waiting for a few parts to arrive so that I can send the new boards off to Screaming Circuits for assembly.

DMT

no report

PSL

no report

Arm Cavity Baffle Diffraction & Scattering

Note from D. Coyne: We are considering raising the arm cavity baffles at the end stations since recent measurements indicate that up-conversion from a scattering source is just visible in the interferometer noise spectrum. The arm cavity baffle at the corner station would preclude use of the TCS (which was added after the baffle was designed). The arm cavity baffles are in the vacuum system but not positioned on their support structures.

Mike Smith

Diffraction from the edge of the arm cavity baffle:

I used ZEMAX to calculate the diffraction around the ITM due to insertion of the arm cavity baffle near the ETM. I assumed that the same amount of power is diffracted toward the ITM surface. My edge-diffraction model agrees within a factor of 2 with the ZEMAX calculation over three orders of magnitude of diffracted power. I used my model to extrapolate the ZEMAX results to a baffle diameter of 270 mm. The diffracted power around the ITM with 5000 W circulating power in the IFO is 5 E-14 W.  I reported previously (T980027-01) that the effective length of the diffracting edge is reduced due to coherent cancellation of the field because of the differing path lengths from the different parts of the tilted edge; with a tilt of 57 deg, the diffracted power is reduced by a factor 1E-6. Therefore, the diffracted power into the IFO from the baffle edge is approx. 5 E-20 W. This is well below the requirement for the arm cavity baffle of < 3 E-18 W.

Scattering from the edge of the arm cavity baffle:

The BRDF of the baffle edge @ 33 deg incidence was assumed = 0.3 sr^-1 (corresponding to a Lambertian scatterer). The scattered power into the IFO is 7 E-21; this is well below the requirement for the arm cavity baffle of < 3 E-18 W.

ITM Absorption & Scattering Characterization

Note from D. Coyne: A plan for analysis of the ITMx optic just removed from H1 due to anomalously high absorption (~15 ppm) is being prepared by a group led by Bill Kells. The first step will be confirmation of high absorption in the Reflection/Transmission Scanner system at Caltech.

Liyuan Zhang, Lee Cardenas

The measurement for AR, HR scattering for the 4ITM04 as well as the bulk absorption measurement has been completed. The data and results will be provided soon by Liyuan Zhang.

We are preparing the set-up to be ready for 4ITM07 (the ITMx optic recently removed from H1) when it arrives.

  • Most likely this week, ceiling construction repair (part of the HVAC system work) will be done in this lab. Therefore, the entire laser system will be turned-off.

40 Meter Interferometer (Weinstein)


No report (in Stockholm).


Thermal Noise Interferometer (Black)


Since our last report, we have unpacked the mirrors, inspected them, and started gluing magnets on them. Kate and Chinyere have been locking the TNI with sapphire mirrors to learn how to calibrate it and to take data.

Kate: While waiting on the new mirrors, learned how to align and lock the TNI, and to model the Pound-Drever error signal. She is currently working on a matlab program, with Eric's help, to convert the error signal to an equivalent length noise and to break down the various individual noise sources. She has read and given presentations on Saulson's 1990 Phys. Rev. D paper, "Thermal Noise in Mechanical Experiments" and Yuri Levin's 1997 paper on mirror thermal noise and inhomogeneous losses. She is currently reading the literature on coating thermal noise, in preparation for interpreting the data from the new mirrors.

Richard: Helped Akira debug the bond-noise experiment; began designing the support system for the load weights in the bond-noise experiment; and started the machine-shop course. He also read and gave a presentation on a paper on non-Gaussian noise (Ageev, Bilenko, Braginsky, and Vyatchanin, Phys. Lett. A 227, 159-164 (1997)).

Royal: Found that the photothermal experiment was not operational, due to cannibalization of optics by other experiments. Read paper on Pound-Drever locking; wrote matlab code to plot the Pound-Drever error signal for different modulation frequencies, cavity-mirror reflectivities, and phases; explored the Pound-Drever error signal in the low-modulation-frequency regime, which is applicable to the photothermal experiment; read paper on mode matching (Kogelnik and Li); wrote matlab code to calculate mode matching distances and waists; stripped out all old optics from photothermal experiment (after making a careful record, in case she wanted to recover the state as she found it); calculated new mode matching; mode matched to photothermal cavity using her new solution; aligned the beam to the cavity, and locked the laser to it. This pretty much completes the probe-beam path for the photothermal experiment. Also, she read and gave a presentation on Braginsky's original paper describing thermoelastic-damping noise and photothermal noise (Braginsky, Gorodetsky, and Vyatchanin, Phys. Lett. A 264, 1-10 (1999)).


LASTI (Ottaway)


(From: Richard Mittleman)

Ken is continuing to make progress on the BSC-FEA model. He has added the concrete floor and the chamber.

Myron is working on assembling and testing the hardware needed to lift the spacer and quad-pendulum assembly in the chamber. The decision to insert the entire structure as a unit has significantly increased the load.

Rich has been working on the problem of the non-linearity and the hysteresis of the low frequency BSC HEPI transfer functions. There is an ilog entry on the Lasti ilog on July 1, 2005 with some data and preliminary conclusions. An update will be posted soon.


Data Analysis and Computing (Lazzarini)


Simulation and Modeling (Bhawal)

Simulation Activities

(from Biplab)

  • Xiao Xu, Caltech undergraduate, has finished preparing mirror map for the new Input mirror (4ITM05) of H1 interferometer for use in MIT FFT code. First, the tilt present in mirror map (data from Garillyn's Core Optics webpage) is removed and then the map (originally available for the central 15cm diameter region) is mathematically extended to cover the 24cm diameter surface of the mirror. The resulting maps are prepared in both 128X128 and 256X256 grid of pixels.
  • I ran FFT code with new ITMX map data included. There is not any significant change as far as recycling gain and contrast defect are concerned. Since the new mirror has almost the same transmission (~2.8%) as the old one, we cannot expect much difference in recycling gain unless we change our assumption of 70-100ppm total losses in each mirror. Past FFT studies showed that inclusion of maps in simulation reduces recycling gain (from 47 to 36). The new mirror map did not change that scenario. The sideband gains also remained at the same level as before.

Alfi

(Melody)

  • Continuing with fixing the Problem Reports (PRs).
  • Continuing fixing PR 483 -"check into new way to display java remotely"

Data Analysis Activities (Lazzarini)

Shourov:

Started working with Isabel Leonor and Lindy Blackburn on producing a review document for the Q Pipeline.

Continued working with Sahand Hormoz on an extension to the Q Pipeline to target positions of interest on the sky.  Sahand is currently developing the necessary code base for such a search.

Working with Patrick Sutton, Massimo Tinto, Antony Searle, Leo Stein and Albert Lazzarini on extensions to the Gursel-Tinto method to coherently search for bursts in three or more non-aligned detectors.

Working on integrating data conditioning and frame reading functions from the Q Pipeline into such a search.  I am also testing the possibility of using such a coherent approach within the Q Pipeline.

Performed cross-validation of our detector response code for network analysis with the simulated bursts injections for project 1B of the LIGO/Virgo joint data analysis working group.  The results show reasonable agreement in both timing and attenuation of bursts with random linear polarization as seen in Hanford, Livingston, and Virgo.

Continuing trigger production for S3 detector characterization and veto studies.

Mendell:

Joe Betzwieser and I are setting up to use the StackSlide code to analyze the S4 data, though the usual distractions have prevented us from getting as much done as we had hoped. I have promised a progress report at next weeks pulsar telecon, however.

Searle(ANU visitor):

More planning for implementation.  Investigation into significance of two remaining orthonormal (but not null) "residual" streams.  Sum of null and residual chi^2 or power is constant wrt sky position, equal to total power of whitened detector streams.  This means null stream \chi^2 can be computed from the residuals or vice versa, so only two streams need consideration for any N.  Now looking at expected distributions, thresholds, statistics etc. to completely determine meaning (confidence etc.) of results.

Shawhan:

  • The usual Burst Group organizational work and oversight.
  • Spending a lot of time with SURF students Sarah Caudill and Sebastian Cassel
  • Continuing to review pulsar analyses.

Yakushin:

  • Processing LIGO-VIRGO simulated data using quadruple coincidence version of waveburst. At first glance, there appears to be a problem in the timing of injections into Virgo resampled channel (the actual timing seems to be somewhat different from the declared one). Might be a problem in MDC frames or in postproduction scripts.
  • Processing SG18 low frequency sine-gaussian injections and SG19 high frequency sine-gaussian injections for S4 LIGO burst analysis.

Zanolin:

  • Network analyis work with Jarred and Peter
  • Ran more tests for the compiled parameter estimation on MIT and CIT clusters.
  • Started a draft of the report on the WB5 review.

LIGO Data Analysis System

Software Systems (Blackburn)

LDAS

Started the investigation as to why the wrapper tar ball for 1.6.0 for Anand did not succeed (PR#2842). When built on ldas-pcdev3, there were no issues.  Need to look into the build logs for his build.

Worked with Stuart to try to reproduce the issue of LDAS' blindness to files on /archive (PR#2722). In the midst of this, the unbalanced '{' has reappeared and appears to be due to string truncation at the C++ layer. Code is in place to give more feedback so that this problem can be analyzed and corrected.

Reviewed the components of LDAS that will need to be modified to correct for the January 2006 leapsecond that is on the way. Found three areas where leap- second information is used. Began reviewing these to identify a common solution.

The migration away from NFS file services to QFS file services on the LDAS DEV and tandem systems has reduced overall LDAS performance by a bit more than 10 percent. In addition, many of our system and integration tests are now failing and need to be modified to work with this new file system and its unique issues.

With the down time from the QFS file system migration and the down time due to the chilled water work which resulted in further LDAS DEV and Tandem down time this week, we approached the DASWG with a request to delay the next release of LDAS until July 27th. This is found acceptable by the DASWG as most other LSC software projects are expecting to be a week or two later on delivery as well.

TCLGLOBUS

Released TclGlobus version 0.2.0 to the LSC last week. RPMs were made compatible with LSCSoft repository and handed off to Patrick Brady for inclusion in the LSC RPM repository.

Began addressing the issues with threaded support that didn't make it into the 0.2.0 release of the software.

OSG

Drafted a pre-proposal to the OSG for consideration at the July OSG consortium meeting in Milwaukee. This element of LIGO's pre-proposal looks at our involvement in the integration testbed.

Discussed meaningful topics to cover in a presentation at the OSG consortium meeting in Milwaukee to address LIGO's involvement in OSG.

Configured the Grid User Management System (GUMS) including Apache, Axis, MySQL, and Tomcat. Installed initial GUMS server and GUMS client tools. Tested the "instant gratification" gums.config groupMapping. Discovered undocumented requirements for X.509 certificates that were posted to osg-int mailing list by another engineer also working on GUMS. Found problem with initial authorization to GUMS server when using either a web browser or the command line tool "gums generateGridMapfile". Further debugging and analysis will be required. Early attempts to configure GUMS on the OSG Gatekeeper failed so moved the GUMS onto TclProxy server.  This actually makes for a more secure configuration as recommended by the Priveledged Project Group.

Hardware Systems (Anderson)

Caltech

(Dan Kozak)

  • Worked on LIGO part of Powell-Booth chilled water outage (prepping for shutdown, shutting everything down, bringing everything back up).
  • Moved QFS metadata server for export-dev filesystem from dataserver- dev to gateway-dev.
  • Continued to work on synchronizing files between LHO & CIT.
  • Did a lot of work to make the CIT /archive filesystem consistent (duplicate elimination, moved all engineering and maintenance run data to /archive/frames, etc.)
  • Have been replacing RAID3510 disks as fast as Sun can get them to us (3 disks outstanding as of this writing and I'm about to call in 2 more).

(Phil Ehrens)

  • Upgraded several desktop systems to Fedora Core 4.
  • Added more diagnostics and progress output to the desktop config script(s).
  • Performed a variety of hardware diagnostics on the ldas-test node4 machine, which has suffered a hardware failure of as yet undetermined type.

(Stuart Anderson)

  • Worked on the planned system outage for LIGO computer equipment in the Powell-Booth building at Caltech.
  • Replaced LDAS-CIT cluster node with unit from LDAS-TEST since the failure mode is not obvious and requires additional testing.
  • Successfully built and ran unit tests for LDAS source code on a FC4 machine.
  • Reported on 2 very minor problems with building LAL on FC4 using the bundled gcc-4.0.0 compiler, both have already been fixed by Jolien.
  • Upgraded grid gateway machines to a 2.6.12 pre-release kernel to get a fix for staging SAM-QFS files via NFS.
  • Worked on reconfiguring the new export-dev filesystem to see if the 5-10% slowdown in LDAS jobs can be recovered by switching the NFS server between 2 machines.

Livingston

(Igor Yakushin)

  • Bought 16 512Mb spare memory DIMMs. In particular, one or two DIMMs will be needed to fix node31.
  • We had a few minute power outage at LLO last week. UPS kept all the servers and storage alive through the outage. Only the nodes were rebooted. Couple nodes did not restart automatically and had to be booted manually. After the outage, there was a problem with LDAS which might or might not be related (createRDS jobs were crashing).  Restarting LDAS fixed the problem. However, several days later, diskcacheAPI started misbehaving again: frame queries and createRDS jobs would not run. Restarting diskcacheAPI fixed the problem for now.

General Computing (Wallace)

MIT:

(Keith)

Nothing to report

Livingston:

(Shannon)

  • Most of this week has been spent working on cleaning spyware out of PCs still.  One PC was infected so badly that I will have to reload it.  The user only needs e-mail and web browsing capability so I am considering loading Linux on it.  This will solve the virus and spyware issues on that PC while still allowing the user to e-mail and web browse.
  • Thinking about how to get some useable statistics out of snort.  It is providing lots of information but I do not have an easy way to share this information.  It may involve purchasing a commercial software package if I can not find an OSS alternative.

Since 6/30/05:

SSH brute force scans:  7,343

TCP port scans:  ~3,950

web related alerts:  8,674 (many false alarms)

trojan/virus alerts:  1,241

  • There was some activity on the network recently that needs to be addressed.  I have the MAC address of the person but I have not been able to identify the owner of the laptop.
  • Working on updating the support web page now that it is back up.  All of the printer docs will change once I have relocated the printers to new IP addresses.

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
  • At about 11:40 p.m. PDT on July 1st the network became very slow and finally died.  Following a power cycle of the main switch and the router the network was back on line at about Noon on July 2nd.  The problem was traced to errors on the main switch causing multiple interface resets.
  • Attended a TechMart training session.  Helped some with setup for the webex training.
  • Had to clean and put in new ink cartridges for two inkjet printers being used in the staging building by the visiting teachers.  Setting up a better PC to replace an old one in the staging building.
  • Ordered a new laptop for the auditorium to get setup before the LSC.  Also purchased some more Linksys wireless access points and a NAT router to be used during the LSC.
  • Purchased a new desktop PC for a user.  Purchased a replacement laptop battery for a user.
  • Renewed the Matlab networked license.
  • Other misc. user support.

MIT:

(Mike)

  • DHCP125: loaded solaris 9 on a ultra 100 to rebuild DHCP server for the subnet. Larry finished this installation up.
  • Worked the Spam Filters with Larry.
  • Patrick Sutton: Took a look at his broken laptop. This ended up having a problem with the keyboard & CPU fan; both had to be replaced.
  • Barry Barish: On his X31 laptop the hard drive was damaged. I had a backup drive that I swap this out with. I had to update his e-mail and my docs.  X41 new laptop; I loaded all General Computing Software, and transferred all his data over from ghost image.
  • GC Server Room: Ran some cables from the KVM switch to computer rack where the new dhcp125 server is to be transferred to. This server is currently in my office.
  • Setup a few more user accounts and worked on some e-mail and printing issues.

(Veronica)

  • LSC:  Updates of the roster database.  Updates of the e-mail lists.  There is a utility to generate these updates but it gave an error so I did it by hand, the error message needs to be checked.  Addressed an issue with the authorize.net billing for account setup for the August meeting online payment form, posted updates to the meeting website.  Updates to the LSC website.
  • LIGO:  Updates to the CIT/MIT homepages.  Working on the makeover of the Advanced LIGO Project Management webpages.

(Christian)

  • Started to update the LIGO IP & Inventory Database, So far I have finished the front and back of the Wilson house. I'm also working on updating all of the loaner laptops with the latest virus definitions and security patches.
  • Installed different s/w pkgs. on the PC's for the SURF students.
  • Other misc. onsite software/phone support.

(Larry)

  • This has been a busy week for procurement related items. It took some time but a special cable converter was purchased for one of the CIT labs.  Another notebook computer was ordered and most of the new IBM notebook computer has arrived and has been distributed.  Ordered a number of UPS replacement batteries, three of the older units are in constant error conditions because of bad batteries.  Assisted other groups in the LSC looking at webcam purchases.
  • Setup a replacement DHCP server with Mike. The unit is up and running and needs to be put into the computer room.
  • The air-conditioning for the computer room is now being reviewed by PMA. The new building system, that has just been installed, will not be sufficient for the computer room.
  • Assisted a number of SURF students with adjusting their systems and work locations in order to handle their assignments. This appears it will be an ongoing process for the next couple of weeks.
  • Assisted Mike in wrapping up a new PC installation.
  • Reset the VRVS system in Millikan. The new s/w setup that the VRVS has implemented looks to be pretty clean. All of the tests went well.  Kent B. will be doing some more testing before his meeting next week.  If used and setup properly the VRVS system can be a good way of handling video conferences.
  • Resolved a couple of minor network problems. One dealt with cables being moved in one of the network closets. The other problem was the DNS server going down because of a cable being knocked loose.
  • Finished up another E2E Linux setup. Working on a couple of other E2E items and should have them wrapped up next week.
  • Cleaned out a number of accounts and moved data around for different people.  Working on a list of accounts to be deleted. The list when finished will be distributed for review.  Performed monthly backups on the home directories.
  • Worked on the mail server. The changes appear to have helped keep things stable during spam storms and problems with other mail servers.  The continual work with the spam filters goes on.

Mail Statistics

June 30 - July 06, 2005

Rejected Messages

22,722

Virus Messages

906

False Positives

176

Accepted Messages

10,125

Total Messages

32,847

 


Advanced LIGO and Supporting R&D (Shoemaker)


Systems and Management

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

  • With Jay Heefner, made changes to the Universal Suspension Design Requirements Document, T000053-03 to include more electronics requirements. This version of the draft will be released soon for next week's SUS electronics review. Some of the electronics requirements will also be incorporated into the over-arching "Generic Requirements & Standards", E010613

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 report on structural dynamic coupling between the SEI inner stage and the quad suspension structure, T050014-00

 

Vacuum Compatibility & Preparation

Residual Gas Assay (RGA)

See also the Vacuum Bake Lab

Bob Taylor

  • Prepared the floor area in the Bake oven lab where the new oven will set.
  • Studying the manual and schematics on the new oven operation.
  • Evaluating micro coax samples and connectors for possible use on the electrostatic drive on the quad suspension.

 

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

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

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 daily 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.

Advanced LIGO Project Management

(from Carol Wilkinson)

Progress updates for Advanced LIGO subsystem development for the period from May 1 to June 30 are due July 14.

Meetings & Reviews

  • Future near term planned meetings & reviews are indicated in the table below.
  • Report from SUS Requirements Update Review held on June 15, 2005 is available: M050216.00.
  • BSC Critical Design Review 3 was held July 7, 2005. Report in progress.

Only Change since last week: COC metrology review ~10/05

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

 

 

~Oct

COC

PDR

Review 1

 Metrology

 Review and select  vender and in-house metrology

 

 

TBD

COC

PDR

Review 2

 

SYS PDR?

 

 

Seismic Isolation

From: Ken Mason kmason@ligo.mit.edu

Advanced LIGO Seismic Structure

SEI Structure

A document has been written (T050113-00) which describes the requirements, analysis, and alignment procedures for the Advanced LIGO test stand being built for LASTI.

From: "Joseph A. Giaime" jgiaime@ligo.phys.lsu.edu

Suspension

From: Janeen Romie romie_j@ligo.caltech.edu

Advanced LIGO Suspensions

Tim Hayler from RAL has joined us for a week here at Caltech. He’ll be working on the ITM suspension, specifically the thermal compensation design, with Phil Willems and Mike Smith. He’s also met with Mike Gerfen and Calum yesterday to go over the fabrication process for the upper structure. Mike is doing the final machining on the upper structure and hopes to be able to deliver it on Tuesday.

Datum Control will have the lower structure ready at noon tomorrow. I’ll go down and pick up the parts. Valley Precision has all parts ready. I picked up the dummy tablecloth for the Stanford structure Tuesday, along with other structure parts. Calum is picking up more parts from Valley Precision this morning. Mike Gerfen has a number of parts ready for us as well.

Working on the spacer for the LASTI mode cleaner.

Working with Bram Slagmolen on the small optic supsension particulars.

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

No report this week.

From: Ken mailand kmailand@ligo.caltech.edu

Adv. LIGO

The LIGO large part bake oven arrived Thursday 6-30.

Making simplified S/W drawings of the Adv. LIGO optical component assemblies for import to Zmax, for Mike Smith.

From: "Mark Barton" <mbarton@ligo.caltech.edu>

This week I made improvements to my pendulum modeling toolkit to allow for properly including the wire damping in models using mass beads to approximate violin modes. Formerly, if wire elasticity was enabled for a model, the toolkit assumed that each wire was a massless beam under tension. For tension large compared to the natural stiffness of the wire, this implies that most of the wire bending (and associated energy loss) is very near the end points. When mass beads are introduced to approximate the distributed mass of the wire, this creates new wire endpoints for the purposes of the model, but only the wire bending at the very first and the very last is physically realistic. Thus I added a toolkit feature to allow any particular endpoint to be treated as hinged rather than clamped, and used this in the version of the quad model with violin modes that I recently developed for E2E. I published the new model and toolkit at <http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/~mbarton/SUSmodels/asus4L2V5/>, and Ken Strain is using them to check for interaction with the global control.

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

AdL SUS

  • Continued work on DRD and presentations for upcoming design review.
  • Working out interface details with the UK.
  • Completed a preliminary layout of the vacuum cabling harness for the quad.

AdL SEI

  • Continued testing of the reconfigured Capacitive Position Sensors received back from ADE.

Core Optics

From: Helena Armandula <ahelena@ligo.caltech.edu>

No report this week

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 is beginning to assemble the OPTLEV receiver apparatus.  I am awaiting help from Ben Abbot for the QPD readout.

SLC

Shasta has almost completed the assembly of the BRDF apparatus.

RING HEATER/ELLIPTICAL BAFFLE

Ken M. has created a Solid Works model of the conceptual ring heater and the elliptical baffle to be attached to the quad SUS. The conceptual design is estimated to weigh less than 3  kg. A STEP file was given to Tim Hayler of the Rutherford group.

Other Laboratory R&D

From: Riccardo DeSalvo desalvo@ligo.caltech.edu

Anamaria (David is out for 2 weeks):

I'm still working on the setup, now concentrating on the mass suspension. Still waiting for LVDTs and blades in order to put the electrical part together as well. Then actual data taking will happen.

Marco (28Jun)

First fft simulations showed a good agreement with actual profile data. Offsets and tilts changes the shape of the fundamental mode, but almost always the new one can continue to be considered as a linear superposition of the tem00 and tem01.  On Friday John and I rehabilitate again our lab.  We switched to a quite-flat input using a 1” lens as an aperture. Now the first peak on the spectrum is the highest. Unfortunately we are locking on misaligned configurations.  Comparisons with the theoretical spectrum predictions are in progress.


For additional information about this report, contact Stan Whitcomb or Phil Lindquist