Weekly Report for Week Ending August 18, 2005

The LIGO Executive Committee meeting for August 22, 2005 is cancelled due to the meeting of the LCGT Advisory Committee (Tokyo).

Special Announcements:

Weekly Report Highlights:  The report is a bit thin since much of the LIGO staff is in flight returning from the LSC meeting (reported to have been active and successful) held at Hanford this week.

LSC Issues (Saulson)

No report.

LIGO Laboratory Administration (Lindquist)

STATUS OF LSC MOUs (Lloyd)

LSC MOUs and Research Plans and Progress Reports

  • Continued to work on August 20'05 MOU reports (33 total) and completed converting them to pdf files and merging them into a single document for each group. Kept in contact with Peter Saulson with regard to LSC members submitting their reports on time (the deadline was Friday 8/5). Needless to say, some people did not meet the deadline.  Files were finally completed and went on-line Wednesday evening for the LSC Review Panel to review prior to the August 22-23 meeting. Spreadsheets with links to the various MOU group files were also set up and maintained during this reporting period, for the use of the review panel (Albert worked closely with me on this). FTE numbers for each of the MOU groups were extracted from one of the spreadsheets and calculated and submitted to Keith Riles for S5 scientific monitoring (scimon) shift allocations for the LSC groups.

Non-LSC MOUs (Lloyd)

  • No report this week.

SITE TELECONFERENCE (Lindquist)

No site teleconference was scheduled for Thursday, June 18, 2005.

  • The list of assigned actions updated through May 26, 2005 (the last time that it was changed) 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 (at LSC Meeting in Hanford and going to visit Synergy for initial contacts to prepare for installation of document management system).

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

Week Ending

August 18, 2005

In

Out

Packages

23

13

Faxes

28

21

 

  • Most effort this week focused on processing documents from the LSC Meeting this week at Hanford.
  • Assisted in sending out RFP for Relocation of LDAS at LLO.
  • ***Update on Scanning Project*** - To date approximately 40 boxes of old account charge files have been scanned.  Most of these scanned files still need to be burned on to cd's.  We anticipate that being done within the next week or so.  Once that is done, all of these boxes of files can be shredded which will free up some office space.

COST SCHEDULE CONTROL SYSTEMS (Cunningham, Brambila, Kaufman)

>From: "Cronin, Holly" <Holly.Cronin@caltech.edu>

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

  • Closed out purchase orders and moved files from last year purchase orders to set up the new files for the new fiscal year. Sent the closed purchase orders from FY2003 to Record Retention for safekeeping.
  • Shopping a computer order for LLO as web price is higher than requisitioned.
  • Completed funds transfer on the purchase order to Linos Photonics and the expenditure type change.
  • Responded to Accounts Payable inquiries on tax questions for purchase orders issued for delivery to the sites.
  • Issued purchase orders for procurement of computer goods for delivery to LLO.
  • Closed out the subcontract to Bogue dba Blue Sun and sent out the Release of Claims.
  • Completed change order #4 to Aztec Rents and faxed the change to the vendor.
  • Completed the purchase order to Louis Mechanica for the pipe changes at LLO and faxed to the vendor. The material to do the work is being ordered by the vendor which will take approximately 1-1/2 weeks, and the actual work itself is anticipated to take about 2 weeks.

>From: Florence Kaufman <fkaufman>

  • Attended a meeting with Ann Margaret Chrisney the head of Caltech's Property Services Department, to discuss whether the purchases of tapes for LIGO's Data Storage Systems would qualify to be classified as equipment.  We were informed that they would not qualify; decision was based on the way that similar purchases by other Caltech organizations are classified.
  • Received a determination from Trasey Fraser the head of Caltech's Project Accounting Department that the stipends paid to LIGO's summer students qualify to be treated as participant costs and would therefore be exempt from Caltech's Indirect Rate.  The correct expenditure type to be used for such payments is "Stipend-Participant Support".  Carol Casey of the SURF office has been requested to submit the paper work to have the correction made, so that the Indirect Cost that has been assessed for the payments thus far can be reversed.
  • Created and sent out reports for the site discretionary accounts and the Hanford conferences account.
  • Notified by Caltech's property services department that sales tax had been on Government equipment which should have been exempt from Sales Tax - notified the account manager, so that claims for reimbursements of the sales tax could be requested.
  • Sent out reports for Low Noise, MIT Grid, US India and DIA Awards.
  • 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 architect for the LLO Science Education Center, Eskew - Dumez - Ripple, has reviewed the schedule of values submitted by the low bidder, Cangelosi - Ward, and has identified some areas where the price may be reduced substantially.  They are currently in discussions with Cangelosi - Ward to see how much the bid can be reduced.
  • A Request for Proposal for the relocation of the LDAS equipment at LLO was released on Tuesday, August 17.  A job walk is scheduled for Wednesday, August 24, with proposals due on Wednesday, August 31.  The estimated cost for this effort is $60,000.
  • A contract was awarded to Louis Mechanical Systems for the re-work of the LLO water system in the amount of $26,000.  This is to resolve the problems of corrosion in the current system.

SUPPORT (Baldon, Hiroto, Lloyd)

>Irene Baldon

Processed the paper work for twelve (12) new/revised trips.  At this time there are three (3) trips completed but awaiting the necessary paper work to enter the P-Card system.  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.  Worked with Criselda Rodriguez-Brodeur, P-Card Administrator, to straighten out the use of two (2) travelers using their P-Card for travel when I had already made all travel arrangements for them.

Completed thirty-eight (38) Expense Reports and there are eight (8) 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 three (3) reports more than thirty (30) days old.  I have zero (0) reports awaiting signature at this time.  Worked on closing out the CT's associated with the SURF Field Trip and have begun organizing the CT's for their final return home.

Reconciled twenty-two (22)P-Card charges for the week, requiring telephoning hotels and car rental agencies to verify which traveler used my card and for what amount.  Reconciled a total of one-hundred-five (105) for the month ending August 15, 2005.

>Julie Hiroto

No report.

>Dorothy Lloyd

  • See above (STATUS OF LSC MOUs)
  • Jim continued with data entry in the LIGO database and helping out in the DCC.

PROPOSALS and REPORTS (Lindquist)

The Proposal for an Extension to FY 2007 and FY 2008 and Supplemental Funding for LIGO Operations was previously reported as submitted to the NSF.  The NSF has requested additional material.  Contributors to the Annual Report have been contacted to provide additional material.

DCC Steering Committee (Lindquist)

The Executive Committee discussed the change request during the meeting Monday, August 8, 2005.  The committee recommended approval.  Approval is pending additional information in response to questions forwarded through B. Barish by a document management system specialist at SLAC.

CHANGE CONTROL/CONTINGENCY MANAGEMENT (Lindquist)

  • CR-050008, LIGO Document Management System, was discussed during the Executive Committee meeting Monday, August 8, 2005.  The committee recommended approval.  Minutes have been prepared.  Approval is pending responses to additional question forwarded through B. Barish by a document management system specialist at SLAC.

HUMAN RESOURCES (Akutagawa)

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

  • The next Staffing Committee meeting is scheduled for August 29.  All files for the Staffing Committee are up-to-date and posted on the SC web page
  • Processed time sheets and submitted to payroll.

Quality/Safety (Tyler)

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

No report (vacation).

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

No report.

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

L1 Interferometer (Zucker for Frolov)

Two damaged photodetectors on the antisymmetric port were replaced with spares. This recovered the previous high-frequency noise floor, although the damage/noise mechanism is not fully understood yet.

Rolf upgraded the front end code and worked to try and replicate the mysterious 0.25 Hz/1 Hz periodicity seen in Periodic group SFT's. It is a strange problem, no clear diagnosis at this point.

The new tilt correction feature was successfully tested on HEPI. This new path in the code anticipates and corrects for twisting of the HAM gullwing structure, preventing the conversion of large microseismic excursions into tilts. Next step is to propagate to all chambers.

Brian used HEPI excitations to induce large velocities (order 10x ambient) in the end test mass stacks during low-noise locking to investigate up conversion due to optical backscatter.  A clean backscatter signature appears, but so does a fair bit of other noise; this "tail" scales differently with velocity, indicating more than just small-angle scatter is at work. We are discussing possible theories, in the hope that we can project the effect back to ambient velocities and reconstruct whether it is a candidate for the low-frequency excess noise.

We had a site-wide power outage Wednesday, due to a tripped breaker at our DEMCO substation. Most digital systems came back extremely well, recent efforts at rationalizing the boot sequence having been successful. However we did suffer a blown PA-85 in an LOS bias module (an ECN to protect these was in progress and should be implemented before the next outage).  In addition there was a subtle anomaly in the HEPI control code initialization which caused periodic overloads and impeded robust locking; this was finally tracked down today (Thursday).  L1 is now behaving nicely.

Some other power failure consequences in Shannon's report below.

Education and Outreach (Zucker for Thacker)

John is at a CILS workshop this week in San Francisco.

Friday we will host the Southern University Joint Faculty Convocation at LLO for the second year.  Joe Giaime will welcome our guests and Valera Frolov will give them a VIP tour. Bonnie has arranged meeting rooms and catering for the affair.

MZ met with EDR and construction contractors to discuss value engineering for the SEC construction. MZ and SEW also briefed NSF on progress and status of the construction program.

Site Safety and Security (Riesen)

Found no safety concerns on weekly site safety tour.  End stations scaffolding is completed and certified safe by installation company.  End stations cleaning is in progress.  Staging building crane VFD retrofit and inspection is complete.  Responding to LHO's 8-14-05 ISCT incident report.  Lisa Bogue has completed her eye exam and her prescription laser safety glasses are on order.

LLO General Computing and LIGO Computing Security (Roddy)

During the power outage earlier this week, I made a judgment call to bring down the servers before the UPSs ran out.  Last time when the UPS finally went down, it took out a motherboard and a hard drive.  Unfortunately, this time when shutting down the RAID array which houses the user directories, the ROM became corrupted.  This happened once before a long time ago and when there was not critical data on the disks.  So, I had to reload the software to the RAID and kept my fingers crossed that the data would be intact.  It came up fine, but it added about 1 1/2 hours downtime in addition to the power outage.  Working with Sourcefire on the possibility of using their front ends for snort IDS.  Caltech is already using it and speaks highly of it.  If I am going to start watching IDS deployments in addition to just Livingston, something along these lines would be necessary.

Working with Solaris 10 zones again.  Looking into the scanner released by Microsoft to look for machines vulnerable to the latest worm.  Updated the snort rules on the IDS.  I have not seen any traces of the zotob worm that LSU is infested with right now.  Some interesting numbers:  When the newest windows worm started spreading this week, I looked at the logs for port 445 probes.  I then filtered only for the LSU network.  The numbers clearly show the fact that infected LSU machines were attempting to spread the worm to our network:

Aug 13th:  2,940 probes

Aug 14th:  12,443 probes

Aug 15th:  60,522 probes

After scanning the network for vulnerable machines here, I will patch any that need it.  The firewall protects us from outside machines infecting LLO, but it does not protect us from a laptop coming in that is infected.

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

Ken's in flight. After kicking it around yet again with UF up in Hanford, we have decided to again take delivery of the IPG laser, which IPG  again claims is 'fixed.' Hope springs eternal. We simultaneously looked at some backup plans (unfortunately, most start with buying a lottery ticket...)

Initial LIGO Detector Science & Engineering (Coyne)

CDS

no CDS weekly meeting due to the LSC conference at LHO

CDS Software

Rolf Bork

LLO has had problems with Hepi2 tripping out regularly since the recent power outage. Still working with them to try and determine the cause.

CDS Hardware

Ben Abbott

LSC RFPD

1)      The mostly-stuffed boards have returned from Screaming Circuits, and the remaining parts will be stuffed shortly.

2)      I am discussing with Rich the changes to the test procedure that will include the tank transimpedance measurements, high-power testing, and others.

DMT

no report

PSL

PeterKing

Armed with the results obtained by tweaking the compensation capacitors for the AD829s used in the intensity stabilisation servo, I tried to study effect of the compensation capacitor parameter on the output slew rate.  Oddly enough for the particular non-inverting configuration I tried the recommended compensation capacitor value was amongst the worst available.  Something that might be attributable to the leaded implementation.

ITM07 Optical Absorption Testing

Liyuan Zhang, Lee Cardenas, Bill Kells

The bulk absorption test for the 4ITM07 has been completed. The test was done at ~3" below AR coating surface and as before, we found the absorption to be ~ 4ppm/cm, same as the middle layer. We are using the 3" Dia. MMTI4K04 mirror of ~1ppm absorption measured recently in Stanford as a comparison.  The results can be seen at: 4itm07_abs_2_a1.pdf data being prepared and released.

40 Meter Interferometer (Weinstein)

Osamu presented a status report of the 40m program ( pdf or ppt) at the LSC Technical Plenary Session, 8/16/05.

Ryan presented his results on "Noise Budget for the 40m", and Marcus presented his results on "the Design of the Output Mode Cleaner for the 40m", at the LIGO REU Seminar Day (today). They both did great jobs. Their talks and final papers will be posted soon.

IFO commissioning:

  • Osamu, Rob and Seiji moved the CARM offset to a smaller value than ever before, so that the power in the arms was roughly 25 percent of the power expected at full resonance. They measured the transfer function of the DARM loop, and saw a clear RSE peak at ~ 4 kHz, as expected. Thomas Corbitt's code predicts this peak well, but it also predicts an optical spring peak at ~ 16 Hz (based on Osamu's estimate of the stored power in the arms), which was not seen. Under investigation!
  • Osamu, Rob and Seiji performed a series of experiments in which they reduced the CARM offset until lock is in danger of being lost. Then they HOLD the CARM loop servo, and let the mirrors swing freely (DARM is controlled). Sometimes the mirrors would swing towards full resonance, and the DC and RF signals were monitored. IT looks like the RF signal (SP 166) behaves as expected and can be used to lock CARM at resonance. Work in progress.
  • Ryan, working with Ben and Monica, made more noise measurements and transfer functions for his 40m noise budget study.

IFO modeling and DC detection development

  • From Monica: Reconfiguration of the e2e package for the 40m with the use of new primitives and bundles. The package is much more readable now. Tests of lock acquisition procedure in simulation.

Electronics, Controls

  • Ben reports that: the Common Mode Servo controls are almost functional. I've been troubleshooting the bugs for a few days now, and understand the remaining problems. Jay and I solved the last mysteries this morning, and I will now set about remedying them. There's some work that needs to be done on the XY212 with some slight modifications needing to be performed on the board. The database for the 4116 needs some modification, and the screens need some slight cleaning up. It should all be done by tomorrow.
  • One of the Epics computers (c1losepics) died yesterday (probably power supply). Rolf replaced it with his development computer until we can get a replacement.
  • Ben has begun looking an the motor controller for the vertex hoist crane. Troubleshooting is slow, but progressing.

Thermal Noise Interferometer (Black)

Analyzed the data. Shot noise is high, due to low visibility in SAC, so no conclusions about the new coatings yet.

Kate and Rick gave their final SURF talks..

LASTI (Ottaway)

No report.

Data Analysis and Computing (Anderson for Lazzarini)

Data Analysis Activities (Anderson)

(Peter Shawhan)

I spent this week at Hanford for the LSC Meeting and the Burst Group face-to-face meeting days before and after it.

(Gregory Mendell)

Presented an update on the StackSlide search at the August 2005 LSC meeting.  See: http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/docs/ScienceDocs/G/G050374-00.pdf

(Teviet Creighton)

This week I have been working on the Einstein@home result validator, adding verbose output and preparing it for the new S4 extended result file format.

(Vuk Mandic)

I ran the stochastic analysis code on the S4 stochastic hardware injection data. Of the four injections, the analysis is not complete for two (missing calibration data, or frame-files of non-uniform length), one was successfully recovered, and one seems to have revealed a 2-sec offset between H1 and L1.

I have also started running the software injections for the S4 H1L1 case.

At the moment, the injections seem to be successfully recovered at 5e-4 level, but further studies should be made.

I have also worked on the paper examining the accessibility of the pre-Big-Bang models to LIGO. The paper has passed the internal LSC review, and I hope to be able to submit it in the coming few days.

Simulation and Modeling (Bhawal)

Diffraction Losses in Advanced LIGO cavity

(Biplab) This is related to the work on 'parametric instability in Advanced LIGO' being mainly led by David Blair. Using my Matlab FFT code of the Advanced LIGO cavity, calculated diffraction losses and ideal 'clipping' losses of resonant beams in this cavity for different mirror radii. Losses for various higher order modes are calculated and results were presented by David in LSC meeting.

Transverse Shifts of Beam and Optics

(Biplab) Doug Fettig, my SURF student from Oregon State U. worked on simulation of transverse shifts in beam and optics in LIGO interferometer. He quickly learned to use both SimLIGO and MIT FFT code.

Before he arrived, the effect of Transverse shifts in full LIGO interferometer was not really studied or tested using these simulation tools. So, for example, his studies helped us to find an important bug related to this issue in MIT FFT code.

The results produced by these two codes are consistent with each other and also with simple analytical deductions. SimLIGO's length and alignment sensing and control worked well to rotate mirrors appropriately to nullify the effects of transverse shifts in mirrors which basically rotate beams on reflection.

Simulation of 40m Advanced interferometer

(Monica) Reconfiguration of the e2e package is done for the 40m interferometer with the use of new primitives and bundles. The package is much more readable now.  Tests of lock acquisition procedure in simulation are going on.

Alfi

(Bruce) - Completed port centering work (PR 325).

  • Fixed introduced bug (from port centering) (PR 497)
  • Fixed bug which displaced the location of new ports in the internal view when inherited ports exist (PR 492)
  • Working on FUNCX node bug where changes in the node are not registered to make the node change to the proper color (PR 494)

(Melody) Continuing with fixing the Problem Reports (PR). Fixed PR 496.  Also created a super class AlfiDialog to contain standard method of sizing, placement, and managing the window manager close events.

LDAS Software Systems (Blackburn)

LDAS

Continuing to look into the new sources of disappearing threads in the diskCacheAPI. New logging/debugging code has been added and is running on both the LDAS-DEV and LDAS-TEST systems.

Continuing to pursue the development of X509 certificate authentication within the controlMonitorAPI for connections with the GUI clients. Now have a version of TclGlobus libraries on Solaris for this development.

Will support both the old style username and password and the new X509 certificates in the next LDAS release.

TCLGLOBUS

Fixed segmentation fault issue caused by calling globus_gass_transfer_send_bytes when dealing with EOF case.

Changed the Tcl interface of the function so that we are able to take appropriate actions setting up the callback mechanism to handle EOF.

Inside SWIG-wrapped function, check for buffer length passed in from Tcl layer. Based on this buffer length, if it's non-zero, we perform normal buffer management setup for callback and if it's zero, we just set up normal callback without allocating resources to hold the data.

Ported TclGlobus project into Solaris platform to support LDAS development using certificate-based authentication. I'm still having issues on how to verify GSI-based testsuite since it requires proxy cert.

Worked together with May Lei on how to integrate TclGlobus XIO package on cmonClient server and client LDAS components.

OSG/GRIPHYN/IVDGL

"The Science Grid This Week" electronic newsletter has an article on LIGO's use of Grid technology in its search for gravitational waves.   See  http://www.interactions.org/sgtw/2005/0817/ for details.

Reviewed the Lightweight Data Replicator (LDR) Administrator's Guide version 1.25.2.2 and determined the following facts:

  • The Replica Location Service (RLS)  is configured on TCP port 39281.
  • The gsiftp service on each RLS is configured on TCP port 15000.

In order to support the Inspiral LDR-based application, an analysis will be required to determine which OSG ITB sites access services on ports which are not Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards compliant. Both of the LDR TCP ports in use are not IETF standards compliant.

Performed a yum update and reboot of all nodes of the test bed cluster.

Developed a draft web page version of the site policy with text provided by Kent Blackburn. Received approval for publishing this policy to the ITB GridCat.

LDAS System Administration (Anderson)

Caltech

(Dan Kozak)

  • Worked on getting a quote for a Sun support contract from Ray Gedert.  Have now received his first draft.
  • Tracked down why LLO dataserver:/usr/bin/true was being overwritten and eliminated the bad cron job.  Have been working on crafting a replacement.
  • Did an inventory and accounted for all the T3s purchased.
  • Ejected tapes for shelf storage at LHO.
  • Replaced bad file at LHO with copy from CIT and made sure it was rearchived.
  • Dealt with fallout from CIT archiving silently failing and /archive filling up.  Spent some time checking with users as to what problems if any they had during the period when the disk was full.  Have subsequently been monitoring the well being of the archiver quite closely.
  • Dealt with fallout from LLO power outage (samfsck of /archive, /frames, /fb0_frames & /dmt, checked for corrupt files [there were none]).

(Phil Ehrens)

  • Assisted Stuart in a reboot of the entire LDAS-CIT cluster for the purpose of a kernel switch.
  • Met with Kent, Ed, Mike, and Mary to discuss possible strategies for integration of LDAS and Globus/GRID.
  • Issued and installed host and datarobot certificates for and configured ldas-suntest3 to provide a development platform for the integration efforts of Mary and Mike.
  • Generated performance benchmarks for an ide-raid server (ldasdatatet1) for Linux kernel software raid 0 (striping) layered on top of the raid 5 provided by the 3ware Escalade 7500-8 hardware.  Benchmark tests were run on the transfer of a single very large (16Gb or 8Gb) file using the reiser, ext3, jfs, and xfs filesystems. Write performance of the reiser filesystem was nearly twice that of the other filesystems, but tests over NFS showed roughly equal write performance for all filesystems (~10 Mb/s).  Methodology and result tables can be seen at: http://inferno.slug.org/cgi-bin/wiki?RAID
  • Replaced memory in node127 of the LDAS-CIT cluster after failure.
  • Prepared a cd-rom with partition images for upgrading the operating system in use on the ide-raid systems to Fedora Core 4. This will be tested on the unused ldasdatatest1 machine before installing it on the live data servers.

(Stuart Anderson)

  • Identified and reported a serious problem with Condor being unable to checkpoing jobs on Linux systems running the 2.6.12 kernel.
  • Rebooted the LDAS-CIT to an older version of the kernel to temporarily work around the recently discovered condor checkpoint problem.
  • Upgraded the cluster head nodes and the version of Condor at LLO  to 6.7.10 while the system was off-line due to a power outage.
  • Discussed S5 planning issues at the LSC DASWG meeting.

Hanford

(Greg Mendell)

  • The LDAS HVAC upgrade at LHO is scheduled to start August 29 and complete within a week after September 21.  A requistion for tapes to archive the S5 data will be put in by the end of this week.

(Ben Johnson)

  • Replaced bad T3 disk.
  • Moved or will shortly move two of the last three cluster users to /archive/home.
  • Attended LSC meeting. Main contribution was made during the DASWG infrastructure meeting.
  • Worked on converting "realtime" (un)publishing script to use a segment-based algorithm. This should allow (un)publishing of frames from fb1 and fb0 (the latter's files would only be published to fill in gaps).
  • Received 12 replacement drives for the cluster nodes. I will start making plans to fix several "sick" node drives. This will be a good opportunity to work on some node disk cloning techniques/scripts.

General Computing (Wallace)

MIT:

(Keith)

(No report)

Livingston:

(Shannon)

  • During the power outage earlier this week, I made a judgment call to bring down the servers before the UPS's ran out.  Last time when the UPS finally went down, it took out a motherboard and a hard drive.  Unfortunately, this time when shutting down the RAID array which houses the user directories, the ROM became corrupted.  This happened once before a long time ago and when there was not critical data on the disks.  So, I had to reload the software to the RAID and kept my fingers crossed that the data would be intact.  It came up fine, but it added about 1 1/2 hours downtime in addition to the power outage.
  • Working with Sourcefire on the possibility of using their front ends for snort IDS.  Caltech is already using it and speaks highly of it.  If I am going to start watching IDS deployments in addition to just Livingston, something along these lines would be necessary.
  • Working with Solaris 10 zones again.
  • Looking into the scanner released by Microsoft to look for machines vulnerable to the latest worm.
  • Updated the snort rules on the IDS.  I have not seen any traces of the zotob worm that LSU is infested with right now.  Some interesting numbers:  When the newest windows worm started spreading this week, I looked at the logs for port 445 probes.  I then filtered only for the LSU network.  The numbers clearly show the fact that infected LSU machines were attempting to spread the worm to our network:

Aug 13th:  2,940 probes

Aug 14th:  12,443 probes

Aug 15th:  60,522 probes

  • After scanning the network for vulnerable machines here, I will patch any that need it.  The firewall protects us from outside machines infecting LLO, but it does not protect us from a laptop coming in that is infected.

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
  • LSC support, LSC support, and more LSC support.  Thanks to Larry and Mike for all their help.
  • Started writing an agreement form for people to sign if they want to use their privately owned computers as work computers.
  • Ordered some Dell switches for GDS for both LHO and LLO.
  • Other misc. user support.

CIT:

(Mike)

  • W/B server room: Installed a edge switch, and 2U rack mount server for Primavera software. I have loaded server 2000 and started loading service packs and implementing security.
  • Worked up in the 3rd floor conference room troubleshooting VRVS computer.  Someone played with the video connections and VRVS settings. After updating the VRVS software and putting the video cables back where they belong; everything started working again. I was able to transmit and test the video/ audio output.
  • Barry Barish: Trouble shooting an e-mail issue, plus backing up his laptop.  I made some additional changes to his mail settings, plus made some other changes.
  • Phil Willems: Problems with his notebook, which gave him problems on his trip to Moscow. This turned out to be a defected LCD screen. I have called Dell and they are sending out a replacement LCD screen.  This should be taking care of on Monday. I have turned this over to Christian, being that I will be in Washington on Monday.
  • Dwight Carter, Primavera: Loaded Primavera 3.1 software for Dwight Carter over here at LHO. I also assisted him in transferring his data from ARES laptop to new LIGO laptop.
  • Spam Filters: Worked with the spam filters while Larry was out at LHO.
  • Printing supplies: I have did an inventory on printing supplies looking for supplies that we are no longer using. I ended up with a pretty big list. I have brought these supplies down to the Basement to be ready for Gina Salone for shipping back to for refunds.
  • Other misc. user support.
  • LHO: Helping out at the conference with laptop issues, plus working the projectors for the different types of laptops and OS's.

(Veronica)

  • LSC:  Continued working on the database of the LSC papers under review.  Installed the webpages for the presentations for the August meeting, posting updates as they arrive.  Larry and I monitored the web cast of the opening day talks; except for a few times when either the hub or the machine could not handle the data flow, the webcast went smoothly.  We also tested the VRVS before the meeting but ended up using the webcam instead.  Updates to the meeting website and other LSC webpages.  Updates to LSC mailing lists.  Updates to the webpage of observational results.
  • CaJAGWR:  Compressed the video of the last talk, a pointer to the stream is posted at the CaJAGWR website.
  • LIGO:  Website updates.  Roster database updates.  Reloaded my new desktop, rebuilding the old machine.

(Christian)

  • Phil Willems: Called Dell support to have Phil's LCD screen checked and replaced on laptop.
  • GaryLynn Billingsley: Configured Gary's new laptop with the standard Ligo image.
  • Calum Torrie: Transferred data and setting from old laptop to new laptop.
  • Dorothy Lloyd: Working on configuring a laptop for Dorothy to take to MIT.
  • Synchrotron: Worked on surf student workstations to get a Data Acquisition Card to function properly. I was able to install and update the latest drivers from National Instruments to get the card working again.
  • I'm working on creating a standard image that will work with different laptop models and workstations.
  • Other misc.: Continued onsite software/phone support.

(Larry)

  • Procurements and reconciliation took some time this past week.  SUN took a great deal of time to get some information on the billings and we still have a bit of work to do to get it all corrected.  Orders for notebook replacements and a number of monitor replacements have been made.  Tracked down the new printer. Shipping and receiving should deliver it this week.  The Lenovo order was also a long a painful experience. However, I think it may be due to the transition of moving from IBM to a new company.
  • Spent time last week assisting Christine and others in support of the LSC mtg.  Overall things went well and they are a good crew to work with.  Discovered a few network document items that needed to be updated and sent them to Richard and Christine.
  • Assisted the DCC with a number of items, including the LSC meeting support.
  • Setup a few new accounts. Started checking off the SURF students as they are now starting to return to their home institutions.
  • Worked on the backup server and jukeboxes. There was a problem in that the cleaning tapes needed to be replaced which cascaded into other problems. All appears to be working properly once again.
  • Had a rogue process causing problems on the mail server. After cleaning up a few files and resetting a users e-mail things went back to normal.  It did take a couple of hours to track the specific problem down. Thanks goes to all those that ran tests for me.
  • More time was spent on reorganizing the server room.  Still no word on when or if we will get any additional air-conditioning.
  • Worked on the spam filters.

Mail Statistics for Aug 11-17, 05

Mail Statistics

August 18, 2005

Rejected Messages

17,473

Virus Messages

495

False Positives

489

Accepted Messages

12,686

Total Messages

30,159

 

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

  • nothing new

Interface Issues

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

  • prepared talk: "Coupled Dynamics of Payload Structures on the Seismically Isolated Optics Table", G050427-00 (was to be an LSC talk, but will now be a future SWG teleconference talk)

Systems Design/Support

  • issued memo "Transforming Finite Element Eigensolutions to State Space Modal Models", T050125-00

Vacuum Compatibility & Preparation

Residual Gas Assay (RGA)

See also the Vacuum Bake Lab

Bob Taylor

  • I have been cleaning and organizing the Bake Lab and clean room to receive the parts that will be coming in from the quad suspension work.
  • I have cleaned and started 2 bake jobs on the 2nd MC parts from Janeen and Calum. Rich and Dave should be here next week to work with these parts in the clean room.
  • I will do the wiring on the reaction mass and continue to wire cables for the OSEMs on the Quad.
  • Just a reminder, I will be on vacation from Sept. 4th to Sept. 16th.

High-Irradiance, Contamination-Exposure Cavities

Lee Cardenas, Liyuan Zhang

No change

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

~2 more weeks to completion

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.

~2 more weeks to completion

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.

 

From: Rolf Bork rolf@ligo.caltech.edu

 

  • AdvLigo: Alex got Epics running on our dual AMD64 computer. We are now able to run Epics on one CPU and the real-time control process on the second CPU, with communications between the two via a real-time shared memory block. We ran the LIGO LSC code as a test. The LSC cycle time is now 14usec, but no PCI I/O is going on. At least this is a proof of principal. The next step is to get some PCI I/O modules and begin the quad-suspension software. The test system was developed using an evaluation copy of a hard real-time Linux OS. Since this worked out well, I have gone ahead and ordered a couple of development and target licenses.

Seismic Isolation

From: Ken Mason kmason@ligo.mit.edu

SEI Structure:

ASI has completed the analysis of the blade modifications. The results have been sent to the design people to update the solid model. Due to vacation scheduling, they will not be starting the design until 8/29/2005.

An update of the Advanced LIGO seismic isolation costing has been completed and sent to Carol Wilkinson.

Initial results of the BSC pier amplification model has been posted on the seismic website. The remaining work is to add the spring effect of the dirt below the concrete and to add bellows between the chamber and support tubes.

Suspension

From: Janeen Romie <romie_j@ligo.caltech.edu>

Advanced LIGO Suspensions

The 2nd MC's stainless load should be done today. The aluminum load should be done tomorrow. It is our hope that Rich and Laurent can come and assemble it here in the So. Annex clean room. We have the shipping crates to send it to MIT.

We were working on the clamp design for the wires to replace the drum ended wire. They should be done by Ric's shop today. Worked on updating the tablecloth covers to perform added responsibilities. Those should be done by Mike's shop tomorrow. Working on getting files into the vault.

We met with Mike Gerfen on Tuesday about the installation fixtures for the quad. He has enough information now to go ahead and give us a quote and delivery time. We discussed various fabrication methods for some of the complicated parts. He will note the fabrication method on the quote. He hopes to have the quote done tomorrow. There are many piece part drawings that still need to be done but they are mostly straightforward.

From: ctorrie ctorrie@ligo.caltech.edu

Quad build

Last week Janeen and I, with help from Norna, Rich and Bob Taylor suspended the quad at Caltech. This build included the lessons learned from the first assembly with RAL two weeks ago and followed the 3 and 1 assembly specifications. Photos can be found at: - http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/~ctorrie/QUAD_ETM/quad_etm.html

Cap stand clamps

As an alternative to the drum ended is being investigated for the controls prototype suspension, reference link below, design meeting notes and pictures.

2nd Structure for Stanford (then Glasgow)

Lessons learned from the 1st welded structure are being applied to the 2nd structure. These include some simplifications to the designs as well as some modifications.

More details can be found in the notes for this weeks Design Meeting: - http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/~ctorrie/QUAD_ETM/quad_etm_setup_2.html

Installation fixtures

Janeen and I worked on arranging Oddvar's lift and transport table files so that Mike Gerfen could offer us a rough estimate for cost and time. Not all of the drawings were available so sketches when required.

Files to the vault

Janeen and I have been working on updating the files to the PDMWorks vault, this includes the re-works and all of the files that we have been working on recently.

2nd Mode Cleaner

The second mode-cleaner for LASTI has been dismantled and the parts are currently going through their vacuum bake load.

From: Ken mailand kmailand@ligo.caltech.edu

Sent an end station layout to Doug Cook re. the photon calibrator beam clearance area, around baffle structure assembly.

Making simplified S/W drawings of the Adv. LIGO optical component assemblies for import to Zmax, for Mike Smith, and converting Mechanical Desktop LHO full site layout to S/W

Core Optics

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

 

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

1. The questions raised in regard to Parametric instabilities have launched now quite an industry in computing the diffractive loss in arm cavities for HTMs. Of course this had been looked into in the past. However for LIGO I this was not a critical issue. For AdL it may be (for other reasons than Parametric, also).  Several codes have been marshaled. I too, am at work trying to make consistent sense of all the results. For instance it may be that previous (naive BCs.) FFT results on this may not now be sufficiently accurate.

2. I am also on the Gin-Gin review committee. This has heated up and I am compelled to consider plans, proposals, and attend meetings. We are trying to make a "big leap" with the Perth people now in town.

Pre-Stabilized Laser

From: Peter King pking@ligo.caltech.edu

The OEM NPRO has apparently shipped from Germany so I would expect it to arrive on campus sometime in the next week.

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