Weekly Report for Week Ending December 15, 2005

The LIGO Executive Committee Agenda for Monday December 19, 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
    • 40 Meter (Weinstein)
    • TN, ( Libbrecht)
    • LASTI  (Shoemaker)
  • Data Analysis and Computing (Lazzarini)

5.      R&D and Advanced LIGO (Shoemaker)

6.      CHANGE CONTROL BOARD/TECHNICAL REVIEW BOARD SESSION AS NEEDED

  • Change Request CR-050010, Prototype Seismic Attenuation System for the HAM Chamber (HAM-SAS), if approved, will add the fabrication and test of a predominantly passive, seismic isolation system prototype for the HAM chamber to the Advanced LIGO R&D program.  We will probably not be ready to discuss this request during this meeting.

Special Items:

Special Announcements:

 

Weekly Report Highlights

LSC Issues (Saulson)

Lindy Blackburn reports that the S3 untriggered burst search paper has been accepted for the Amaldi proceedings, which will be published in Classical and Quantum Gravity.  It can be found at gr-qc/0511146.

Steve Fairhurst announces the posting of the LIGO/TAMA S2 inspiral paper, as gr-qc/0512078.

The LSC Detection Committee is being revived, with Rai Weiss as Chair.  It had a re-organizational meeting on 9 Dec; it will meet Monday.

A large subset of LSC member groups presented their new NSF proposals at the LIGO PAC meeting on 12-13 Dec at LHO. In the Spokesperson's opinion, they did a very good job.

LIGO Laboratory Administration (Lindquist)

STATUS OF LSC MOUs (Lloyd)

  • No report.

SITE TELECONFERENCE (Lindquist)

A site teleconference was held Thursday, December 15, 2005.  The following issues were discussed:

  • Livingston Science Education Center – construction reported as going well.  The steel work for the foundation has been completed and the concrete will be poured Monday.
  • Property – The AC Unit is on its way from Hanford to MIT and should arrive any day now.
  • Security Gate at Livingston – Having a problem with the delivery of the replacement gate.  Other than that all ready to go.
  • Visitors to Livingston – the sense is that the availability of hotel rooms in the Livingston area is beginning to improve.  After hurricane Katrina, it was impossible to find any kind of lodging in the area, and a trailer or two was set up on site to accommodate people involved in commissioning and operation.  More on this as things improve further, but it would appear that on site Camp Katrina may be going away soon.
  • The list of assigned actions updated through December 01, 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 (sick leave).

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

  • Scanning Project - Progress continues on scanning of the F. Asiri files.  To date about 8+ boxes have been scanned.  Progress continues on scanning of old blanket purchase order files.
  • Activity:

Week Ending

12/15/2005

In

Out

Packages

33

8

Faxes

24

23 

 

FINANCIAL SYSTEMS (Cronin, Brambila, Kaufman)

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

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

  • Shopped several models of oscilloscopes for discounts. Found one vendor that offered a 20% educational discount on a newer and better model. The discount allowed us to get the better model.
  • Completed change order #168 to Triad and submitted it to the vendor.
  • Completed change order #29 To Support Services and received the signed mod.
  • Completed change order #10 to Star Service and received the signed mod.
  • Working on the maintenance agreement with Sun.
  • Following up on pending credits to be issued for sales tax differences and for a return.
  • Completed the purchase order close out report as requested.

>From: Florence Kaufman <fkaufman>

  • Submitted four Fabrication Request forms and the related PTA Set up forms for Detector improvements.
  • Submitted PTA set up form for PO received from FERMILAB.  Account requested is LIGO.I2U2/1 FERMILAB.LIGO.
  • Updated schedule of unspent FY05 funds for the Data Group.
  • 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>

  • A Work Order for electrical work associated with the HVAC system for LDAS at LLO has been issued to the Excel Corporation in the amount of $8,000.
  • Funding has been received from FermiLab for outreach on grid computing.  A subcontract will be issued to consultant Erik Myers as soon as the new account code has been established.
  • Construction of the LLO SEC continues on schedule with the metal framework being worked on now.

SUPPORT (Baldon, Hiroto, Lloyd)

>Irene Baldon

  • Processed the paper work for seven (7) new/revised trips.  At this time there are ten (10) trips completed or in the works but are awaiting the necessary paper work to enter the P-Card system.
  • Completed sixteen (16) Expense Reports and there are sixteen (16) 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 zero (0) report more than thirty (30) days old.  I have no reports awaiting signature at this time.

>Julie Hiroto jhiroto@ligo.caltech.edu

  • Meeting  to plan Administrative Review for Jan 12-13 (Marie/MIT, Terry/LHO, Bonnie/LLO coming to Caltech for meetings with various administrators and departments).

>Dorothy Lloyd

  • No report.
  • Jim continued with data entry in the LIGO database and helping out in the DCC.

PROPOSALS and REPORTS (Lindquist)

We received funding from Fermi Lab for I2U2 effort at Hanford.  We are waiting for information needed to open an account number.

CHANGE CONTROL/CONTINGENCY MANAGEMENT (Lindquist)

  • Change Request CR-050010, Prototype Seismic Attenuation System for the HAM Chamber (HAM-SAS) will be found at: http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/~phil/ChangeBoard/CR050010.pdf.  This change request was submitted by Dennis Coyne.  If approved, the change request will add the fabrication and test of a predominantly passive, seismic isolation system prototype for the HAM chamber to the Advanced LIGO R&D program.  We will schedule a meeting of the LIGO Change Board to discuss this request.

HUMAN RESOURCES (Akutagawa)

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

  • The next Staffing Committee meeting is scheduled for Monday, January 23, 2006.
  • All files for the Staffing Committee are up-to-date and posted on the SC web page.
  • Prepared miscellaneous appointments and reappointment memos for various Visitors.
  • Processed time sheets in KRONOS [the new Caltech time keeping system that we are all apparently going to have to use –pel] and submitted hard copies to payroll.

Quality/Safety (Tyler)

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

  • Nothing significant to report this week.

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

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

PAC19 took place at LHO at the beginning of the week; thanks to Terry Santini, Terry Gunter, Richard McCarthy and Christine Barker for all their hard work in this regard.

As of Dec 15, we have 261h of accumulated triple-coincidence data in S5.  Daniel's PAC talk breaks down duty cycles in various histograms; we're only meeting our single-IFO duty cycle goal on H2.  Our best duty-cycles occurred during the Thanksgiving holiday week, a rare luxury of extended low anthropogenic noise.  Recovery from this week's Tuesday maintenance was too long, particularly on H2 in which the optics were thought to have drifted, especially the RM.  This will impact how we go into the maintenance period in the future, e.g. relieving alignment and WFS offsets etc.  Details and a mathematica notebook on duty cycles here.

Some highlights from the elog this week:

  • calibration line dropouts continue
  • GRBs during S5 are being catalogued by U of Oregon, now available off of the S5 webpage
  • we continue to be visited by a single-prop plane doing stunts over Rattlesnake Mt. (seen by PlaneMon); glider pilot Dick Gustafson hopes to intercept (at the airport) and convince him or her to try the Blue Mts instead

4K IFO

  • new SUS filters were added to MMT1, MC1 and MC3.  In order to apply the MC ones, we had to go to a 2-stage application by script - first getting to common mode with the old filters, then switching in the new ones
  • large excursions in the H1 range are observed but not yet understood.  Some times they are coincident with H2
  • beamsplitter internal modes appear to couple to optical modes

2K IFO

  • the PSL PMC servo electronics were swapped out.

DAQ, CDS

  • we lost our external network link for several hours

Outreach (D. Ingram)

Our thanks to LIGO PAC member and Goddard scientist Niel Gehrels, PI of NASA's Swift mission, who extended his PAC visit to deliver a GRB talk on 12/14.

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

L1 Interferometer (Frolov)

The interferometer BNS sensitivity and duty cycle have not changed from the previous week levels of 10 Mpc and 50% respectively.

The up-conversion of the low frequency motion into the interferometer detection band remains the main investigation issue for the commissioning team. The switching of the beam splitter electronics into the low noise mode produces a transient which sometimes causes the lock loss during the power up sequence. The new electronics is being prepared which will have smaller transient while still providing sufficient noise suppression.

The Tuesday maintenance tasks were completed within the scheduled four hour time window.

List of this week activities:

  • PEM injections were completed. The corner station pulsed heaters were disabled based on the results of the analysis of the magnetic couplings.
  • A failed hard drive on the back up frame builder computer was replaced
  • The duo-tone timing monitor was connected
  • Improved communication code allowed uninterrupted data collection from one of the three weather stations for up to several days, which allegedly has never happened before. More diagnostics are needed to resolve the remaining infrequent communication drop-outs and bring the remaining weather stations online.
  • The "fast ADC" ifo readout channel at the upper cavity free spectral ranges was re-tested.  The response was found to be commensurate with the excitation and with the response of the nominal low frequency channels.
  • Protective fast software triggering on the ASQ signal was enabled and tested.  The DARM control signal has now switched to the lock acquisition photo detector several times automatically during the train, saving the "lock" and avoiding cavity cool down and re-acquisition delays
  • The DARM open loop transfer function was measured with improved accuracy.
  • Frequency noise data were taken to be used for the interferometer noise budgeting.
  • There was an unexplained change of gain in the sideband power monitoring chain by 3 dB after last week's work on the ASC electronics. The compensation with a hardware gain returned the SPOB level and all dependent gains to nominal values. More investigation is needed to track down the ultimate cause of this change.

Outreach (Thacker)

  • Worked on NSF annual report
  • Met with Southeastern Louisiana University physics department individuals to discuss potential outreach partnership
  • Met with Lisa Szechter (Tulane) to discuss LIGOSEC outreach research agenda
  • Worked on activities for upcoming teacher professional development workshop

LLO Facilities (Sibley)

Work on the Science Education Center is progressing well despite several days of light rain. Dirt work is essentially complete for the foundation and the steel has been placed in the grade beam forms. Concrete for the foundation is scheduled for next week.

LDAS HVAC upgrade PO has been issued to Corporate Mechanical of Baton Rouge. The equipment has been ordered and may be in in early February.  Work on the piping will start next week. Excel has been issued a work order for the electrical work and it too will start next week.

Safety & security (Riesen)

The latest time frame for completing construction of our new main gate is 5 to 7 weeks.

Waiting for the return of the fire alarm people for the logic change needed to change the FM-200 system to alarm the main fire system on the 1st detector alarm rather than the 2nd.

Found no laser nor site safety concerns this reporting period.

Completed the LLO safety indoctrination with Prof. Edward Doomes (Southern U., under Steve Mcguier).

CDS (Bogue)

  • Replaced a failed disk in fb0 3510.
  • Worked with Brian on adding photon calibration channels.
  • Worked with Valera on l1adcufast.  From my perspective everything seems to be working with this except for the status channels.  The status channels aren't working because the status comes off of the framebuilders which aren't currently transmitting onto reflective memory.  This issue will be brought up for group discussion at one of our working meetings.
  • Working with Dave Barker on CDS disk management and getting the raids (delayed because of other S5 issues) up and running at both sites.
  • Added the seismic plots as figure of merit 5 to the elog.

CDS Code Support (Khan)

Developed the weather station interface software. The code has been working properly on Y-end without any communication dropout, but the X-end looses communication in the evening. I am suspecting it may be related to the battery not being charged by the Solar panel. I have requested Doug to communicate with LSC people to see if they are communicating with the station. This would eliminate the battery charging as one of the reason for communication dropout.

Computing and Network Security (MZ for Roddy)

Shannon is away this week representing LIGO at the NSF Cybersecurity Summit for Large Research Facilities in Washington D.C.

General Computing (Giardina)

  • changes to HTML/PHP interface for security server activity logs.
  • scripted retrieval of security server activity logs.  script also "cleans" (removes identifying information from) the published files.  Originals are kept in multiple locations, both copies are backed up on tape.  process is scheduled to run weekly after the activity log report is created on the kantech server.
  • monitor on einstein linux box had minor issue.

LDAS Admin (Giardina)

  • replaced the two power strips that recently failed.  All nodes are back operational.
  • shipped tapes LL0539, LL0563, LL0578, LL0579, LL0582, LL0584, LL0677 to CIT.

Data Analysis (Yakushin)

Storage/Condor/LDAS admin:

  • Installed FC4 on ldas-gridmon and configured ganglia. There still seems to be some problems with it though: it sees only about 90% of the nodes, today all of a sudden it stopped working and I had to restart it.
  • Twice during the recent week node9 stopped working without any apparent reason or error message and I had to reboot it.

Data Analysis:

Working on online waveburst web page.

Initial LIGO Detector Science & Engineering (Coyne)

CDS

see also the CDS weekly meeting minutes in the commissioning archives

CDS Software

Rolf Bork

  • Updated LLO end station ADCU software to send photon calibrator excitation signals back to DAQ.
  • Rusyl found some questionable wiring to the LSC xycom module at LLO.  I believe this is straightened out now, so we will download new LSC code in the next few days.

CDS Hardware

Ben Abbott

Fast Shutter: One of the control boxes came back from Hanford with a problem.  I swapped out the FET, and it now works fine.  I will ship it back to Hanford today.

DMT

No report

PSL

Nothing significant.

Optical Characterization

No report.

40-Meter Interferometer (Weinstein)

IFO Commissioning, PSL

  • Rana and Steve have been working on re-commissioning the PSL. The old FSS board seems to be fried, possibly due to a flaky power supply. So they went ahead and implemented the new tabletop FSS (TTFSS). They spent a long time debugging before they found and replaced a flaky cable. Now the TTFSS is in and working, coarsely tuned, with a ~<1% FSS pickoff. The UGF is 400 kHz with plenty of gain margin, and the gain slider is maxed out. Steve has installed a ~4% pickoff, so we should be able to get the UGF above 650 kHz. Rana tuned a notch on the phase-correcting pockels cell. He also needs to tune a notch on NPRO PZT (fast) path. The FRC periscope is 3-5 mm offset from beam center; will be tweaked.
  • The FSS RFPD has some DC offset on output, and the resonant gain is not in right place. Ben will tune it up with the AM laser setup at Wilson House.
  • The PMC loop gain is low, because the beam on RFPD is attenuated. Rana and Steve will rearrange the PMC reflected beamline to simplify it and get more light onto the RFPD, and Steve put a camera there. (He borrowed it from the SP beamline; now we need a camera there!). Rana's mods to the LLO PMC board are still under discussion at LHO, so for now, we will continue to use our old PMC board.
  • Autolocking scripts for FSS and PMC work.
  • Rana installed and ran a script to do a slow scan of the NPRO temperature, to put the NPRO frequency in a stable place, far from where it likes to mode-hop.
  • Steve installed a new ISS pickoff. Now there will be plenty of light on the ISS photodiodes (when we turn the input power up to 1 watt or more).
  • The PZT steering mirror on the periscope from the SL to the MC has some electronics problems. Rana, Steve and Ben are checking it out.
  • When Rana tried to lock the MC, he noticed that MC2 had anomolously high force-to-pitch coupling. Indeed, Dan found that the SUS Pos gains were all screwed up for unknown reasons. He set them to 1.
  • Osamu and Rana realigned the beam path, starting with the PMC, then the Mach Zehnder, and the periscope, each time gaining significant amounts of transmitted power. Alignment to the MC is pretty good now, and the MC is locked again.

IFO Modeling

  • Rob is at Hannover for a QND workshop. He's giving talks on the optical spring as observed at the 40m, various modeling tools used to understand the AdvLIGO configuration, and his new modeling tool OpTickle. See QND.
  • Osamu worked on e2e and Bench modeling of the 40m noise. He verified with e2e that the RF demod phase of the photodiode at the AP changes the effective homodyne phase, as predicted by Kentaro, and the transfer functions measured with e2e with different RF demod phases agree well with the prediction from the Buonanno/Chen theory with different homodyne phases. This means that we can investigate different homodyne phases with the 40m, even with RF readout!
  • Osamu notes that e2e is currently the only software tool that has both RF readout and radiation pressure effects. Corbitt's code doesn't have RF, Finesse doesn't have radiation pressure. The OpTickle code being developed by Matt and Rob will have both.
  • Osamu has been modifying Bench to get more realistic predictions for the seismic, thermal and suspension noise. He predicts that it may be possible to observe the dip in the noise spectrum associated with the optical spring if we can get all technical noise sources down.

DC Detection Development

  • Mike has changed the drawings of the OMC beamline components to shorten their heights accordingly to accomodate a baseplate. Updated the 40M optical layout to add the changes. Steve is making the new baseplate. CES is modifying the OMC reflected beam steering mirrors mounts, and is fabricating the OMC. Lee Cardenas is assembling two DLC PZT mounts for a test of the OMMT steering mirrors. Mike will show Steve how to assemble the PZT tilting platform to the DLC mounts. He is in the process of submitting DCNs for the changes.
  • Rana noticed that the in-vac DC readout beamline has no beam dumps. He and Steve will get some black glass.
  • The AP table will need some rearranging for the OMC reflected and transmitted monitor beamlines. Rana will see if he can use Mike's ACad layout.
  • The MIT squeezing group propose to build a 2nd level on our AP table to hold their squeezer. We will look for simpler alternatives that don't require periscopes.
  • We would like to dispense with the Mach Zehnder and drive a single pockels cell with one cleverly synthesized waveform to get all our sidebands and no sidebands-on-sidebands. We'll talk to Reitze about the work they're doing on this at Florida.
  • Dan and Sam are discussing how to proceed with testing and developing suitable drivers for the in-vac PZT mirrors for DC readout.
  • Rana is thinking about how to most easily control the OMC length and input beam alignment, using all-digital dithering and demodulation, with existing hardware (so we wouldn't need to but an analog lock-in).
  • Ben is continuing to work on the DCPD mount design. The PD electronics prototype is assembled and waiting to be tested.

Electronics, Controls, Computers

  • Ben and Rana installed the Table Top FSS following the installation plan E040423-00. Ben has drawn up a schematic for the system, and assigned cable names to the cables.
  • Some of the FSS signals to EPICS were being pulled down by the DAQ interface board. Ben discovered that the board was not wired correctly, and he fixed it. We still need to check out the signals through the Sander box to the DAQ.
  • 5 RFPDs are beginning their final assembly for the 40m lab. Ben will tune them to the appropriate RF frequencies next week.
  • Alex restarted our DAQ frame building and logging to our new 1.5 TB RAID array.
  • Alex tried many ways to recover the 3.7 years of minute trends from our old failed RAID array. There's some partial success, but he's still at it. Stuart Anderson came by to help.
  • Stuart is setting up a path to back up our code and frame data onto disk/tape archive at the CACR SAM-QFS system.

Lab Infrastructure

  • We have two new 20" LCD monitors on the operator consoles.
  • The air conditioning thermostat failed. It was replaced and recalibrated.

Thermal Noise Interferometer (Black)

Improving the visibility of the arm cavities has reduced both the shot and electronic noise to about 7x10-20 m/rtHz in both cavities.  Added in quadrature, this comes to 1.4x10-19 m/rtHz for the differential signal. Attached is a plot of the latest noise curve.  Red is data. Top blue curve is old coating noise (undoped). Lower blue curve is doped coating noise. The green curve is the shot/ electronic noise floor, and the black curve is the quadrature sum of this noise floor and the doped coating noise.

LASTI (Ottaway)

LASTI Weekly (Harry, Penn, Mittlemann, Ruet, Ottaway, Sarin, Mason, MacInnes and Shapiro)

Electronics

We are currently sorting through and simplifying our electronics. The electronics for the two triples have been consolidated into a new rack located next to the HAM Xend Chamber. They have been tested and are fully operational again

BSC Installation Fixturing

Last week we received the new clean room and test stand for assembling and testing the internal seismic system and quad-pendulum controls prototype.  Both are currently being assembled, some pictures can be found on the Lasti ilog, on December 15, 2005.

The frame of the clean room has been erected and the final gussets are being installed, after which the blowers and lights will be mounted.

Holes in the floor for the test stand have been drilled and we are testing our assembly procedures to see if they will meet the required accuracy. So far we have mounted two feet and a connecting beam, which are within the needed tolerances.

Initial LIGO Suspension Testing

Working with visiting scientist Steve Penn, we are assembling a mock up initial LIGO suspension to explore suspension thermal noise issues for initial LIGO and any potential enhancements.

We now have nearly all the components, including a suspension cage from Caltech (courtesy of Janeen), a pathfinder optic from Caltech (courtesy of Gari) with standoffs and guide rods put on by Doug at LHO, and various cabling etc.  This all being installed in the old PNI chamber/Ryan's bell jar at MIT.

The plan is to measure violin mode Q's to see what influence the clamps and standoffs have on the suspension wire loss.  With this setup we will be able to vary aspects of the clamping, wire length, etc. that are not accessible at the sites.

Data Analysis and Computing (Lazzarini)

Simulation and Modeling (Bhawal)

Weekly Physics Meeting

Sany Yoshida presented results from his studies of the effects of violin modes in a LIGO I arm cavity. He also talked about his toy model for advLIGO HAM using an e2e box file of zeros and poles to mimic the required AdvLIGO HAM table top displacement.

modeler 3.1.0

(Hiro) A new version of modeler 3.1.0 is released. Major changes are  (1) modeler_freq is reactivated which was disabled in version 3.0 because of the change of the data stream  (2) dual recycling cavity module can utilize threads. With 5 frequencies, on homam.ligo.caltech.edu, the 40m simulation runs 30% faster using 4 threads. Still, the overhead of activating threads is not negligible when compared to the tasks which run in parallel using threads, and thus the benefit is not so great. In the future, when the modal model is implemented, the performance improvement should be greater.

40m model

(Hiro) DC readout scheme is studied using a simple 40m model which was used for the study of optical spring. With Osamu, we start looking into the possibility of building the full 40m model based on the AdvLIGO framework setup by Matt.

FFT Study

(Biplab) Using matlab FFT model, computed the numbers for frequency shifts for higher order eigenmodes in Advanced LIGO arm cavity (with finite-sized mirrors). Sorted out some differences in results with Pablo Barriga (Univ of W. Australia).

Alfi

(Melody) Working on PR 296 - easier access to settings.  Made initial release of the Info Panel.  Currently implementing additional features.

Data Analysis Activities (Lazzarini)

Mendell:

I worked with LDAS to set up a pulsar user with service certificates to generate SFTs at LHO and LLO, and SFTs generation from uncalibrated DARM_ERR is running under onasys. Using these SFTS, a report on an initial StackSlide search for lines in the S5 data is posted here (usual pulgroup group access required): http://www.lsc-group.phys.uwm.edu/cgi-bin/enote.pl?nb=puls5stackslide&action=view&page=2

Shawhan:

  • Attended the LISA International Science Team meeting at Caltech.
  • Reviewed pulsar analyses.
  • Finished preparing S4 LIGO burst search talk for GWDAW.
  • Made suggestions/comments on other people's GWDAW talks/posters.
  • Currently attending GWDAW.

Sutton:

This week I've prepared a talk on the LIGO cheese for presentation at GWDAW 10.  I also helped Maria Principe with her presentation on modelling networks of detectors for GWBs searches.  I've spent the rest of the week at the conference.

Yakushin:

Working on online waveburst web page.

LIGO Data Analysis System

Software Systems (Blackburn)

LDAS

The focus has been on generating 64 bit version of tools and libraries required by LDAS (PR#2958) now that support for large files has been successfully implemented. Have been successful in compiling the following packages 64bit: Tcl, Tk, FFTW, ObjectSpace, lam, lynx and cURL. Have also been successful compiling the lib directory of LDAS 64bit and all unit tests have passed. Will now begin working on the LDAS API source code.

Are nearing completion of the rework of LDAS managerAPI and the controlMonitorAPI to use the newly available TCL-Channel tools from TCLGLOBUS. Testing of these code changes has re-introduced the previously discovered issue with GLOBUS locking up the SUN Solaris 10 kernel when the Globus environment variables are not valid.

Addressed the controlMonitorAPI PRs 2969 and 2964 associated with the running of the "All Users Command" test from the GUI interface.

The code is now in place, but further testing will be needed once LDAS-DEV is back up from the being shutdown for the Millikan power outage last night.

Successfully completed the system and integration testing on last Friday's build (1.8.24) of LDAS.

TCLGLOBUS

TclGlobus 0.4.0 has been released with the following support XIO-based Tcl channel. This release is only for LDAS development to convert from using raw Globus GSI socket to XIO-based Tcl channel.

Resolved the issue with Globus FTP control and data channel synchronization. Based on FTP response code <= 150, the callback clenup routine MUST NOT be invoked because the requested action expects another reply using the same state information from previous action in which the routine MUST be invoked.

Modified MyProxy service configuration on tclproxy.ligo.caltech.edu box to accept DOE-issued certificates only.

GRID COMPUTING

Working with the data repository staff, obtained registered Level 4 data for optimizing storage resources for binary inspiral work flows on storage constrained OSG resources so that wide spread testing of Inspiral work flows can be accomplised.

Determined that a problem exists in latest patch to support Level 4 data in lalapps. Working with developer to resolve the problem.

Discovered that the OSG 0.3.1 release did not have the VDS installed in the base cache. Worked with Kent Blackburn and OSG-INT team on resolving this issue for the release of OSG 0.3.3

Successfully testing Inspiral pipeline from DAG generated with the OSG 0.3.1 release and running on the LIGO-CIT-ITB test bed with OSG 0.3.1 installed.

Fixed error in OSG:vo-0.2.1 pacman cache that had omitted the LIGO VO.

Updated Validation page in OSG Twiki related to latest validations.

On-going OSG-ITB Cluster monitoring and systems administration:

  • Yum updated osg-itb and osg-itb-se.
  • Installed GUMS components including tomcat, mysql and the GUMS server under fc4 on tclproxy. Determined that a new Hibernate object-relation mapping in GUMS 1.1 will require additional engineering effort to update the GUMS 1.0 configuration for osg-itb.

Hardware Systems (Anderson)

Caltech

(Dan Kozak)

  • Still pursuing the question of why some files are not being archived for a very long time and then only with human intervention.
  • Loaded 1025 tapes (barcodes C0????) into the CIT silo.  200 of these will be used for LIGO, the rest may be used by Teravoxel.
  • Helped Lisa Bogue at LLO with replacing a disk in a 3510 (/ fb0_frames).
  • Did several samfscks of export-dev and collected data to assist with the debugging effort.
  • Ended up making export-dev back into a UFS filesystem.
  • Hunted down and accounted for damaged files at all CIT/LLO/LHO.
  • Did the standard tape exporting, shipping, ingesting.

(Stuart Anderson)

  • Attended NSF Cybersecurity workshop
  • Tested new 21kW power strip for each Opteron cluster rack.
  • Shutdown and restarted all the LIGO computers in Millikan for building electrical work.
  • Installed latest SAM-QFS patch on test systems at Caltech which should fix the system crashes we observed at the Observatories at Thanksgiving.
  • Working on a solution to archive 40m frame data.

(Erik Espinoza)

  • Built ldas-kickstart machine for deploying nodes.
  • Deployed 80 nodes using PXE.
  • Configured Condor on 80 nodes.
  • Replaced drives in 'ldasadm1' w/ Western Digital Drives.
  • Replaced memory in 'albireo' w/ Transcend memory for testing.
  • Testing 1UIPMI-B Card Revision 1.1 from Supermicro.
  • Deployed desktop for Dan Kozak.
  • Shutdown systems on Wednesday 12/14 for Millikan powerdown.

MIT

(Keith Bayer)

  • Renewed Sun contract for equipment.
  • Reset foundry switch after it locked up.

Livingston

(Igor Yakushin)

  • Installed FC4 on ldas-gridmon and configured ganglia. There still seems to be some problems with it though: it sees only about 90% of the nodes, today all of a sudden it stopped working and I had to restart it.
  • Twice during the recent week node9 stopped working without any apparent reason or error message and I had to reboot it.

(Dwayne Giardina)

  • Replaced the two power strips that recently failed.  All nodes are back operational.
  • Shipped tapes LL0539, LL0563, LL0578, LL0579, LL0582, LL0584, LL0677 to CIT.

Hanford

(Greg Mendell)

  • I continue to work on a number of issues. The air conditioning noise in the LSB at LHO is an annoyance for people working in the offices (not a problem for the IFOs). I am working on ways to reduce this. The LDAS and GC sys admins also met to discuss how to make the LSC Data Grid tools more accessible to GC users. I also worked with LDAS to set up a pulsar user with service certificates to generate SFTs at LHO and LLO, and SFTs generation from uncalibrated DARM_ERR is running under onasys. The photon calibration channels, L1:LSC-ETMX_CAL_EXC_DAQ and L1:LSC-ETMY_CAL_EXC_DAQ have been added to the Level 1 RDS frames being generated at LLO, starting from GPS 818543232 = Dec 13 2005 15:06:59 CST = Dec 13 2005 21:06:59 UTC.  (These have been in the Hanford Level 1 RDS frames since the start of the run.) S5 RDS generation continues to run smoothly.

(Ben Johnson)

  • Fixing broken nodes. All nodes which have working network connections are working. Some are not cabled, others have odd packet losses.
  • Helping Xavi get his h(t) code optimized for the cluster nodes.
  • Ran Dan's weekly L0 data export script. It was successful.
  • Upgraded laptop to FC4. No data loss occurred.
  • Set up webserver for cluster user output. It is password protected, a completely-GC machine, and mounts /archive read-only.

General Computing (Wallace)

Lazzarini NOTE: I attended an NSF-hosted workshop on Cybersecurity.  The NSF plans to issue a set of cybersecurity guidelines applicable to large NSF programs, such as LIGO. THe impact is being evaluated, but it is likely that some of our less secure practices will need to be changed.  Shannon, Barker, and I have started a dialog about potential impacts.

MIT

(Keith)

  • Received replacement power supplies from Sun for SB1500's
  • Working on OpenLDAP server for gc linux support (and then eventual gc solaris support)
  • Copied Linux dmt software to central NFS mount location
  • Built linux gc workstation (FC4) and am testing it on gc network with LDAP
  • Researching local VPN install on wireless router

Livingston

(Dwayne)

  • Changes to HTML/PHP interface for security server activity logs.
  • Scripted retrieval of security server activity logs.  script also "cleans" (removes identifying information from) the published files.   Originals are kept in multiple locations, both copies are backed up on tape.  process is scheduled to run weekly after the activity log report is created on the kantech server.
  • Monitor on einstein linux box had minor issue.

Hanford

(Christine)

  • Participated in a meeting to discuss consolidation of data analysis configuration at LHO among LDAS and GC. Conclusion is that there is already a method for accessing grid tools from GC Solaris and Linux.  Windows has some support. Long term goal is to have a FC4 GC computer in the Control Room for access to the grid tools.
  • There was a network outage on Tuesday night, 12/13, from about 20:00 to 21:30 PT.  The LHO router did not fail-over to the new backup network as it should have.  I will schedule testing of the backup network with all parties concerned ASAP.
  • Finally was able to get an answer from Cisco on renewing my support contract.  Apparently Cisco is not issuing any new contracts, and since my contract expired more than 60 days ago I have to buy a new contract and have my equipment re-certified.  There are about 50 Cisco partners in Spokane, the closest to the Tri-Cities.  I am hoping to use the same company as PNNL.
  • Lots of user support this week for Kronos and Tech Mart.
  • Purchased two more new laptops for users.
  • Finished setting up a new DMT/GC AMD computer running Solaris 10 as a NIS+.  Still have to do some hardening of Solaris 10 and install the latest patches.  John Zweizig has a collection of application software on his other DMT machines that need to be mounted.
  • Started mounting LDAS directories on all GC Sun computers to allow use of the grid tools from Solaris.
  • On going troubleshooting of the local network experiencing periods of slow performance.  Still have an occasional problem with remote host names not resolving.  This could be caused by the network slow down or by the router dropping packets.
  • Other misc. user support.

CIT

(Mike)

  • Finished up loading and swapping out a sun workstation for Peter King.
  • Loaded a 2003 server for Dennis Coyne to run some simulations using Algor and Ansys software.
  • Worked on a Laptop for Janeen Romie. This laptop had a driver issue, and it would not recognize the hardware key for Solid Works. She is up and running. The instructions I have put together on the Solid Works dongle issue does work. I have posted the fix for Solid Works on my homepage ~mpedraza.
  • Problem with the wireless access points. This turned out to be a network connection issue over in Synchrotron.
  • Working on loading my new laptop "IBM T43 2668-CEU" I have made this a dual boot laptop to run Fedora core 4. The internal wireless card is not compatible with LINUX. I have a few more tricks that I found on the web to try before switching to an Orinoco wireless card. IBM does have a compatible internal card for LINUX, if you purchase an IBM for someone that is planning to run LINUX make sure the internal wireless card is not "11a/b/g Wireless LAN Mini PCI Adapter II" It looks like all other cards are compatible with LINUX.
  • Worked on the new DCC system installation. Was finally able to get the software installed. Now we need to go back and re-install everything from scratch to make sure we have it installed correctly.
  • Spam Filters: Continued work on the spam filters searching for false positives.
  • Other misc. user support.

(Veronica)

  • LIGO: Updates to the PAC meeting website. Posted the meeting presentations. Roster database updates. Prepared high-resolution images for OSA. Updates of various LIGO webpages. Installing Windows updates onWin servers.
  • LSC: Updates of the database of the papers under review. Updates to the Observational results pages. Mailing list updates.

(Christian)

  • Replaced toner cartridges on HP 2550 printer at the 40M. Also, I replaced two old CRT monitors with two LCD monitors.
  • Replaced toner cartridges on HP 5500 printer in Millikan.
  • Re-imaged 3 laptops that were returned to the loaner pull this week.
  • Working on creating a Windows XP Unattended Installing Disc.
  • Other misc.: Continued onsite software/phone support.

(Larry)

  • Resolved a couple more procurement issues. Mainly supply related items.
  • Worked a number of licensing issues. Need to review all of the licenses once again to make sure they have all been renewed for the year.  Setup some special temporary licenses to cover a couple of people on travel.
  • Worked with Mike on setting up a couple of new boxes. One needs additional memory to be useful for the engineering group.
  • Worked a couple of backup issues.  Stuart has given us the go ahead to move the tape storage to the LDAS computer room.
  • Assisted the PMA group with their installation of a quad cpu dual core unit. It is using the RH Enterprise OS. The latest version was missing some drivers so they went back to version 3.  Also, discovered that the fiberchannel card needed to be installed into the slower PCI slots.
  • Continue working on mail filters and user accounts.

Mail Statistics for Dec 08-14, 05

Mail Statistics

December 08 - 14, 2005

Rejected Messages

19,865

Virus Messages

974

Accepted Messages

15,629

Total Messages

35,494

 

Advanced LIGO and Supporting R&D (Shoemaker)

Advanced LIGO Systems, Management

from Dennis Coyne

Systems

See also:

AL Systems web page

AL Systems email archives

Records of Decision or Agreement (RODA)

See also the RODA status web page

  • No new RODAs

Requirements

  • Nothing significant

Interface Issues

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

  •  LIGO Lab is in the process of reviewing and revising our full scale prototype test plan at LASTI, and in particular the seismic isolation system options which support the LASTI program plan. We conclude that LIGO Lab can not benefit from a delivery of the quad noise prototype any earlier than Feb, 2007. We also have concluded that critical information from the evaluation of the quad controls prototype will not be available soon enough to support a currently planned Feb, 2006 Preliminary Design Review of the Quadruple Suspension. We suggest that the SUS/UK team plan for a PDR no earlier than April, 2006 and a delivery of the noise prototype on or about Feb, 2007. The SUS/UK group are considering how to accommodate this delay.

Vacuum Compatibility

Vacuum Preparation [Cleaning, Baking, Residual Gas Assay (RGA)]

See also the Vacuum Bake Lab

Bob Taylor

  • I have received all of the parts to assemble the ESD connectors and have half of them done. I will finish those today.
  • I am currently baking the eddy current assemblies and magnets. They will be out of the oven on Monday.
  • I have an oven load of top mass stainless parts baking in oven F now and that load will be done tomorrow.
  • I have made all 20 OSEM spares and I am putting pinplates on them today.
  • All cabling has been done for the Quad OSEMs and has been cleaned / ready for baking.
  • The FTIR test sample has been taken and I am waiting for Mark to e-mail me the results.
  • Glass plates and optics have been cleaned and will go into oven F as soon as the top mass parts are out. ( probably tomorrow).

High-Irradiance, Contamination-Exposure Cavities

  • No report

Advanced LIGO Data Acquisition

From: Rolf Bork rolf@ligo.caltech.edu

  • Still having problems getting the PCI Express to PCI-X expander unit to work. We now have an RMA to return the unit to the manufacturer for testing. The unit will not be back before Jan. 12.
  • In light of our problems with that unit and the need to field something quickly for the quad testing, I ordered a PCI-X to PCI-X expander from a different company and it arrived yesterday. It appears to be working well in our quad development test setup. It uses a 5Gbit/sec serial link instead of the 10Gbit/sec serial link of the PCI express version, but still quite acceptable for our application. This manufacturer has a PCI express version due out in January and the system I bought can be field upgraded to this version when it comes out. It will just require a new daughtercard in the expansion chassis along with a PCIe card in the host.
  • Ported about 98% of the Hepi software necessary to run 3 chambers at Lasti. Remainder of the work is mostly testing the watchdog code.
  • Recieved PCI-X binary I/O modules for use with Hepi controls. I am in the process of writing the driver (50% complete). These modules have 24 IO channels, programmable as input or output in 8 channel blocks.

Seismic Isolation

From: Ken Mason <kmason@ligo.mit.edu>

Advance LIGO SEI Procurement

Purchase orders were placed this week for the maraging steel springs and rods with delivery planned for 2/15/2005. Some assembly tooling and fasteners still remain to be ordered.

Additional in-vacuum cabling and feedthrus were ordered for the installation of the BSC seismic isolation, quad controls prototype, triple suspension, and Ham seismic isolation.

The granite table which will be used for seismic isolation sub-assembly has been installed at LASTI. Work continues on the installation of the test stand and clean room.

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

Agenda for the weekly SEI telecom

Friday, Dec 9, 2pm Eastern, 1pm Central, 11am Pacific time

Announcements

  • HAM SAS committee has met, and is working on consensus report.

Single-stage active stage study, Brian L:

  • Finesse modeling estimates 10 Hz requirement at 1e-15 m/rtHz for the SRM itself.  Other optics need study.  For RMS requirement, more detailed servo and optical detection SNR calcs need to be done.
  • Requirements review in March, preliminary design sketched out and costed by May NSF review.  Goal is to estimate the cost savings from dropping back to single stage in HAMs.
  • issue of whether all output detectors are in vacuum; extra cost?

BSC SEI status, Ken/ Dennis

  • Limerick parts should begin shipping next week
  • Maraging steel received.  Still no quotes on machining
  • Still working on heat treat specs.
  • Cable order still in prep.
  • LASTI prep underway, including assembly of test stand.

BSC work, adaptive modeling and FIR (Rich M)

  • nothing this week.

HAM control with VME (Pradeep)

  • some trouble with GPS antenna under snow.

LLO HEPI, partial end to the madness - Brian O'R.

  • ITMX HEPI fixed: the instability was a bad Pentac DAC, a stuck bit or the equivalent.
  • It may be still ringing up the test mass bounce mode, and this is under investigation.

ETF platform work - Matt & Brian

  • Stage 1, all 6 DOFs are controlled.  Stage 2, controller under design.
  • System is at air now.  Next big goal is to test pendulum frame dynamics.
  • L4-C dissection photos and movie on web.  Gaps are quite small.  Some of the spider disks seem to be rotated about the cylinder's axis, enough that the little legs can interfere with each other.  Hua says that one can tell when they get stuck by measuring main coil resistance.

Seismometer work - Aaron

  • parts being machined

Electronics, - Jay

  • The design of the chassis and interface boards for the capacitive position sensors has been restarted. I am working with Ken Mailand to make it fit in the allotted space.
  • The actuator coil driver prototyping has been restarted.
  • Pod internal cable harness designs are in progress and should be ready to order in the
  • next couple of weeks.
  • Electronics designs and rack layouts for LASTI ISI and HEPI are in progress.

Suspension

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

This week I integrated a lot of contributions from the design team (especially Ian Wilmut, Justin Greenhalgh, Norna Robertson and Calum Torrie) to come up with a Mathematica model of the quad controls prototype that for the first time accounts for the observed behavior with all as-built numbers and no fudges. New physics had to be added in two areas:

First the fact that some of the wires are diagonal puts the blades into compression along their length, which affects their vertical compliance.  Ian discovered this in CAD simulations, I confirmed it with a single-blade test pendulum, and then showed it can be simply accounted for by treating the blades as sideways inverse pendulums. The blade tip moves on an arc with a radius of curvature a little less than the physical length of the blade, and the horizontal compression creates a negative component of vertical restoring force. This resolves mysteries with the vertical mode frequencies as well as the mass budgeting used to match springs and clamps to payloads.

Second, the fact that the blades have significance lateral compliance turns out to be the cause of the instability of the fundamental pitch mode in the first build. As the masses pitch, a component of the load begins to act laterally on the blade, changing the lever arm between payload force and pitch so as to exaggerate the pitch. Justin and Norna argued that the lateral compliance effect mimics the wire stiffness effect in that it changes the effective flexure points (although in the opposite sense). I confirmed this by adding lateral movement of the blades to my Mathematica model, using values of lateral compliance supplied by Ian. It resolves the mystery of why the reworked pendulum was stable with a satisfactory fundamental pitch frequency with only about half the wire flexure correction originally designed for.

Together these refinements mean that we should be able to make fairly robust designs for future pendulums, even for steep wire angles and/or blades that are less than ideally stiff in the non-working directions.

From: Janeen Romie romie_j@ligo.caltech.edu

Here at Caltech, working with the SUS team on assembling the quad. Provided comments, with Helena, to Caroline and Russell on the penultimate mass and reaction mass drawings for the noise prototype. Hope to have a telecon with them this week. Will meet with Gari this morning about the noise prototype test mass drawing.

Checked with Ric on the progress of fabrication

From: Calum Torrie ctorrie@ligo.caltech.edu

Assembly (re-build)

Janeen is visiting this week. Janeen, Helena, Lee and I have been putting together the top stages and the top masses. Lee and I have finished all of the wires and are waiting on the glass fact plats to complete the lower structure assembly. No major problems to report with respect to the clean build apart from one of the top blade assemblies had to be taken apart and re-assembled due to a bolt that was damaged due to a mis-aligned blade.

Cleaning and Baking

Bob, Lee and I are continuing with the cleaning and baking. As of Friday we will only have the osems, magnet assemblies and glass face plates to bake. With 3 working ovens All of this should be complete by Thursday. one final item, some Viton, will be baked over the holidays!

FEA and lab experiment on the lower structure

Working with Tim Hayler on the structure FEA and in particular considering bolted connections.

Mark and I measured the resonances of one half of the lower structure. Results to follow.

SolidWorks, PDMWorks and CAD

At last weeks opto-mechanical meeting I ran a tutorial on PDMWorks. At a follow up discussion Ken, Mike and I spent 90 minutes or so going through some of the detail of how to use PDMWorks.

From: Ken Mailand kmailand@ligo.caltech.edu

I’m working on shop drawings for the SUS installation plate style fixture for Calum, I have the major details nearly complete and was able to get estimates of cost and delivery from Mike Gerfin at CES, and a local shop.

From: Helena Armandula ahelena@ligo.caltech.edu

 

From: Jay Heefner jay@ligo.caltech.edu

AdL SUS and SEI Controls at LASTI

  • Work continues on design and layout of the quad controls prototype, the Internal Seismic Isolation, HEPI and triple suspension controls.
  • Chassis ordered for prototype of the capacitive position sensor field interface box. Design of the electronics for the chassis are 80% complete.
  • Connectors ordered for STS2 pod cable s.
  • A block diagram and some preliminary requirements for the LASTI timing system has been completed.
  • All electronics are completed and ready for the quad controls test at CIT. These tests will begin when quad reassembly is complete.

Core Optics

From: GariLynn Billingsley <Billingsley_G@ligo.caltech.edu>

A "low birefringence" sample of 311 from Heraeus has been sent for polishing.  This will be tested by Steve Penn for mechanical loss.  RFQ has gone out for polish of four small samples of Heraeus 311 and 312.  These various sizes will be used for pre and post annealing tests.

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

I have been going over the initiatives which were brought up at MIT with respect to the "stable PRC/SRC". As of now there are many issues in this which are separately being looked at and only loosely connected (different "designs", whether it should be PRC, SRC, or both; how much focusing is sufficient; impact on PI, etc). Specifically I have taken up the question: "how would SRC stability affect the need and/or design of the [apparently] necessary OMC? A distinct OMC would seem to be, in itself, a substantial beast. So could it be subsumed in a particular SRC (stable ) design?

More generally, it seems to me that we need to focus on some particular "straw man" PRC/SRC stable design and carry that through to a much more refined level. The concept now (since MIT) seems to have been accepted as worthy. However a reasonable implementation is by no means clear, and then how much actual performance would a "real" design give? The May "deadline" you have emphasized seems alarming, since really vetting even a "straw man" design ought to use the new AdL simulation code which evidently with hardly be available by then.

Pre-Stabilized Laser

From: Peter King pking@ligo.caltech.edu

The relaxation oscillation of the Innolight NPRO was measured.  It occurred at a relatively low frequency of 363 kHz.  Whilst the noise eater suppressed the relaxation oscillation, it added intensity noise at lower frequencies

Auxiliary Optics

From: Michael Smith smith@ligo.caltech.edu

 

Other Laboratory R&D

From: Riccardo DeSalvo desalvo@ligo.caltech.edu

Yumei: learning Solid works

Valerio: out for exams

Riccardo: Working on the installation strategy of HAM SAS in LASTI and other HAMs

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