Weekly Report for Week Ending April 13, 2006

Due to the LIGO Staffing Committee Meeting April 17, 2006, there will be no LIGO Executive Committee meeting scheduled that day.

Special Announcements:

A new version of the LIGO Computer Use Policy has been signed by the Directorate.  It is available from the DCC at http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/docs/M/M020105-04.pdf.

Weekly Report Highlights

The quad controls prototype was installed into the LASTI BSC Chamber on Thursday (See below).

LSC Issues (Saulson)

Telecons were held on Wednesday and Thursday afternoons to run through most of the LIGO talks for the upcoming LSC meeting. At a meeting of the LSC Executive Committee on Friday, the agenda was devoted to discussion and approval of the talks.

LIGO Laboratory Administration (Lindquist)

STATUS OF LSC MOUs (Lloyd)

  • The new MOU with the University of Sannio at Benevento and University of Salerno (TWG) with Attachments DAT, OPS, SUS and Z, has now been signed by Saulson and will be forwarded on to Marx for signature.

SITE TELECONFERENCE (Lindquist)

  • There was a site teleconference scheduled for Thursday, April 13, 2006.  The following items were among those discussed:
  • MIT Contract – We will issue a no cost extension.  Funding for the second half of the fiscal year should follow shortly.
  • Livingston Science Education Center – Remarkable progress reported owing to good weather.  Inspections of plumbing and electrical scheduled for next week.
  • Kinetic Façade for SEC – A preliminary design review is scheduled for April 27th via teleconference.  Additional funds may be required for a prototype.
  • Safety Audit at Livingston – A safety audit is scheduled at Livingston for Monday and Tuesday, 17th and 18th of April.
  • P-Card Training – Scheduled for Wednesday at Livingston.
  • There are currently no open action items.  The list of assigned actions updated through December 01, 2005 (the last update) will be found Here.

PROPERTY MANAGEMENT (Luna)

>From: Rod Luna <rluna@ligo.caltech.edu>

  • Provided assistance to the Detector Group (H. Armandula) with shipping and preparation of a Commercial Invoice for US Customs Clearance of one large mirror to Lyon, France.  Account Number LIGO.OPT - 5.4 - NSFLIGO.FY02ON.
  • Provided assistance to LHO (J. Worden) in clearing a vehicle title from the Treasure's Office.
  • Prepared Capital Equipment procedures to comply with the 5K threshold from Caltech and the Federal Government.
  • Coordinated the termination of a Carnet with US Customs for the Gingin equipment in Australia.

DOCUMENT CONTROL CENTER (Turner, Mak)

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

  • No report.

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

  • No special projects to report.
  • Continued to process presentations from March LSC Meeting.
  • Performed various searches on the database for certain words in the keywords & titles category in order to remove sensitive material and information from public access and viewing.
  • Scanning - Progress continues on contract closeout files.
  • Activity:

Week Ending

04/13/2006

In

Out

Packages

15

7

Faxes

23

19

 

FINANCIAL SYSTEMS (Cronin, Brambila, Kaufman)

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

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

  • Obtained the credit that had been pending for the return of the Agilent Pulse Generator shipped back in Jan. '06.
  • Updated the subcontracts database to reflect the change in PI and grant amendment number.
  • Attended the Data Warehouse training session.
  • Working on the purchase of the van for the LIGO Livingston Observatory.
  • Closed out paid purchase orders and submitted the monthly purchase order close out report for March 2005.
  • Completed change order #172 and #173 to Triad and submitted them for routing.

>From: Florence Kaufman <fkaufman>

SUBCONTRACTS MANAGEMENT (Jasnow, Salone)

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

  • Nothing significant to report.

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

  • Both the Exploratorium contract and the contract with HPD will be modified as a result of the decision to build a prototype of the kinetic facade for the front of the LLO Science Education Center.  The Exploratorium contract will be increased by $10,000, while HPD has not yet submitted a proposal for their effort.
  • A passenger van is being purchased for LLO.  This will replace a GSA pickup truck, which will be returned to the GSA at the time the new van is delivered.
  • Because of shortened payment requirements by the Benton County Public Utilities District, they have been set up to receive electronic funds transfers for their payments.  This method will also be examined for DEMCO to eliminate the fee for credit card payments.
  • A no-cost extension to September 30, 2006, will be issued to MIT.  The additional funds required for the extended period will be added upon completion of a review of the funds remaining on the contract.

SUPPORT (Baldon, Hiroto, Lloyd)

>Irene Baldon

  • Worked on the usual new trips, expense reports, reconciling, calendar reservations, and itinerary entries.

>Julie Hiroto jhiroto@ligo.caltech.edu

  • No report.

>Dorothy Lloyd

  • Met with procurement and PMA staff members to provide procurement some feedback on TechMart use within the PMA division.
  • Processed the usual requisitions for POs and payment request, and approved and submitted the weekly incoming invoices to accounts payable for payment.
  • Jim continued with data entry in the LIGO database and helping out in the DCC.

PROPOSALS and REPORTS (Lindquist)

  • Budgets have been provided to the NSF for the funding for the last half of FY 2006 Operations.
  • An annual report will be required for Operations due at the end of July.  I will be preparing an outline with assignments.

See Advanced LIGO below.

CHANGE CONTROL/CONTINGENCY MANAGEMENT (Lindquist)

  • No open change requests.

HUMAN RESOURCES (Akutagawa)

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

  • The next Staffing Committee meeting is scheduled for Monday, April 17. The DRAFT agenda for the Staffing Committee has been posted on the SC web page. All files for the Staffing Committee are up-to-date and posted on the SC web page.
  • No special activities to report.

Quality/Safety (Tyler)

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

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)

For the second week in a row, some commissioning activities were pursued in the days, with science running in the eves, given that LLO is in full commissioning mode.  On Sunday we had a site-wide power failure which took ~12h to relock IFOs, and several days to fully recover from.  A crow may have caused the outage.  Duty cycles for the week were 45% on H1 and 64% on H2; the standard range and duty cycle update can be found here.

Commissioning/science mode highlights are bulleted below:

  • coil drivers are likely not the source of mid-frequency upconversion
  • violins were tested on H1, Q values extracted
  • 4k IFO WFS were found to be saturating
  • useismic feedback was being recommissioned on the 4k, and PEPI software debugged
  • a SoHold servo was implemented on the 4k steering mirror to maintain optic alignment when compared to its cage
  • a spur was seen in magnetometers at 123.995Hz
  • we had a duotone timing-monitor failure on H1

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

L1 interferometer in S5 (O'Reilly)

Commissioning work continues at LLO. Among the highlights:

  • ISCT4, the anti-symmetric port table, had been mounted on viton rubber stoppers and shows improved isolation.
  • WFS bandwidths have been increased and we already have seen some improvement in stability during construction.
  • Investigations of 60 Hz noise (no joy), and backscattering using new Coil Monitor boards (no conclusions yet).
  • New DTT installation courtesy of Daniel
  • SM readback is fixed after being broken for a long time.
  • New WFS4 diode and a new 2 mm SPOB diode awaiting installation.
  • Some new scripts to check interferometer health are being developed.

A major event during the week was a power outage on Tuesday.  This was timed by fate to coincide exactly with the arrival of the Ice Cube collaboration for a tour.  It turns out that you can give a tour without electrical power.

We recovered from the outage reasonably smoothly, after once again rediscovering the stuck slider problem.

Commissioning is expected to wind down Friday night and then we can evaluate how much better we are over the weekend.

L1 CDS (Bogue)

  • Pulled the old ultra10's and swapped in blade 1500's in the LVEA.  Replaced the crt's with flat panels.
  • Worked with everyone else on the power outage.  Took the opportunity to review our ups setup.  Control6 is currently on ups and can be removed.  The kvm switches are not on ups which means we have no video during a power outage.
  • l1iocstat wasn't starting up properly.  I think the scripts are correct but that they are running before the nfs mounts finish.  I put a sleep into the epics script to see if that would take care of it.
  • Worked on boot issues with poplar, the part of DMT that runs most of our FOM's.
  • Changed all of the cds root passwords.
  • Clearwater, the DMT nameserver, had disk troubles.  Resolving this required a restart of all of DMT.

LLO Outreach (Thacker)

4/7  assisted in tour for Ole Miss physics department

4/7  worked with architect's interior designer to down select interior colors for LIGO SEC

4/8  assisted at Tangi Schools Math Science Partnership teacher development at LLO

4/11  assisted with Ice Cube Tour

4/11  presented at evening science fair, Nesom Middle School, Tickfaw, La

4/12  developed and executed visitor program for Clinton Middle School

4/13 developed and executed visitor program for Hammond East Side Upper Elementary School (middle school)

AdL Suspensions and Isolation, Outreach and Very Very Large Art (Romie)

Advanced LIGO Suspensions

Working on NSF Review material. Still have more to submit. Hope to get to it today.  Dwayne has installed Solidworks, Algor and Ansys on my desktop. I hope to start working on it very soon, so that Dwayne may uninstall & reinstall Solidworks on my laptop.

Working with Calum and the others at MIT. I will be going there with Mark Barton next week.

LLO

Participating in a weekly meeting with HPD on the kinetic wall installation on Thursdays at 2pm Central. We are working on scheduling a PDR with them for sometime the week of April 24th.  I have been answering detailed questions on the blueprints and requirements from Jonas at HPD, with the help of Allen Sibley.

LIGO Computing and Network Security (Roddy)

  • At LHO today-Saturday.  Working on CDS router/IDS with Dave.
  • Attended Educause Security conference in Denver.

General Computing (Giardina)

  • Delivered almost finished PC to Janeen.  Email setup remaining.
  • Site power outage on Tuesday.  Brought down some essential GC servers after realizing power would not be restored before batteries were drained.  Did not get all shut down cleanly before batteries supporting KVM and monitor failed.  When power returned, most came back online OK.  However, there were problems with DNS server loading NIC drivers.  With Shannon and Tom, we were able to resolve the problem.
  • Installed and configured ntpd (Network Time Protocol Daemon) on abundance.
  • Apache2 VirtualHost problems on support.ligo-la. Commented out a couple lines in config file and restarted apache.
  • other usual user requests and support

LDAS Support (Giardina)

  • ejected tapes for shipment to CIT and imported tapes into L700
  • u1d9@t3-1 failed, replaced with u1d8 from spare T3-13, rebuilt raid array on T3-13
  • ejected tapes for storage and imported tapes into L700

Data Analysis (Yakushin)

Storage/Condor/LDAS admin:

  • Due to the fire outside the site, we had a several hour power outage on Tuesday. Since we got an advanced notification of the event, the LDAS equipment was cleanly shut down before the outage happened.
  • There is a tape (LLO0938) stuck in the drive 44 of the tape robot. SUN technician should come to repair it today.
  • u1d9@t1 failed and was replaced with a spare.
  • Downloaded WNB1_BN_S5 burst MDC frames from PSU to LLO and CIT.

Data analysis:

  • Continue polishing APS presentation and participating in the preview telecons.
  • Continue testing and tuning the coherent waveburst version on S4 data.

Initial LIGO Detector Science & Engineering (Coyne)

No report (returning from Italy)

40-Meter Interferometer (Weinstein)

IFO Commissioning

  • Monica and Dan continue to work on the noise budget, including contributions from seismic noise, optical levers, mode cleaner angular noise, frequency noise, and electronics noise (coil drivers, DACs, etc). They tried taking a calibrated noise spectrum with the FPMI, but the AP166 RFPD signal was too noisy. Under investigation.

IFO Modeling

  • Monica continues to work on improving her e2e simulation of the 40m/AdLIGO configuration, with full 5 length DOF control system. She finds that the system won't stay in lock with all 5 DOFs under control, with radiation pressure on all mirrors. Under investigation.

DC Detection and Vacuum Squeezing Development

  • Ben is managing the acquisition of control electronics to be bought/made/designed for the DC readout system, including custom boards (TT-PZT steering mirror driver board, DCPD in-vac board, DCPD satellite board, OMC driver board), cables, and PCIX-based ADCs/DACs. It looks like we could get everything together by early June.
  • Jay is working on the design of the TT-PZT steering mirror driver board.
  • Ben sent out DCPD in-vac board and DCPD satellite board out to PCBexpress for fab. They should be back next week for stuffing.
  • Jay procured and tested the QPDs for the DC readout alignment control system.
  • Steve and Go put together a new open frame equipment rack for the squeezer electronics, taking power from a new circuit (unconditioned power).
  • Go got his second harmonic generator (SHG) working. He replaced the shaky 6-axis mount with a 3-axis positioner, realigned and mode matched, and then easily locked te SHG. He swept the temperature from 81 to 92degC for phase matching. The cavity lock is stable for hours. At maximum, he's getting 400-500 mW of green light out of 2 W input beam. He expects up to 600 mW with improved mode matching and alignment. The intensity stability is ~1-2% at peak output.

Electronics, Controls, Computers

  • Rob made major changes to the length control and lock acquisition front end code, including: (a) fast input matrix Ramping; (b) "bait & switch" which allows one to switch from a demodulated diode signal to some calculated signal, during lock acquisition; (c) a new lock acquisition mode word which summarizes the state of the most relevant lock acquisition settings with a set of bits that can be turned on or off via scripts and enabled wuth a user request button; (d) the "moving zero" filter code that compensates for the optical spring peak as the CARM offset is reduced is now more flexible; (e) and the code is generally cleaner and easier to read.
  • The MC WFS QPDs are probably damaged from too much light power. Ben went looking for spare QPDs, but found none. He plans to order a bunch for the 40m and the rest of the lab; 8 week lead time.
  • A breaker was accidentally switched on the electronics rack housing the digital suspension system. After some struggles, the system was restored.

Lab Infrastructure

  • Steve is thinking of how to add a mezzanine optical table in the PSL enclosure to provide more table space for the mode cleaner reflected, mode cleaner transmitted, AP and SP beamlines.
  • Osamu and Rana are at LLO to help with commissioning activities.
  • Bob is at MIT to help with the quad suspension controls prototype at LASTI.

Thermal Noise Interferometer (Black)

We have performed several tests and are becoming increasingly convinced that the new, higher noise floor really does originate in SAC. The logical conclusion is that this is due to the ring dampers, which models predicted would not happen. Dennis Coyne is helping us by taking a closer look at the FEA models, and we have gotten in touch with Andre Gretarsson.

Also, we have been improving the general state of the lab after the February safety inspections. This week we bought some new laser goggles and beam viewing equipment to replace old, worn out items.

LASTI (Ottaway)

Controls Prototype

This week the local LASTI staff and a lot of visitors prepared the Quad Controls Prototype mounted on the solid spacer for installation into the BSC vacuum tank.  In addition to this, quad alignment fixturing was tested and the suspension was accurately aligned to a fixed reference within a couple of hundred microradian accuracy.  Potentially this number could have been a factor of three lower but the measurement was limited by the suspension damping on the quad.  This remains an outstanding issue that will be looked at next week.  The suspension frame was characterized using the ossems on the top mass as a shaker.  A 45 Hz resonance was confirmed on the frame resonance.

The quad controls prototype was installed into the LASTI BSC Chamber on Thursday.

Double Triple Experiment

Laurent measured a very clean transfer function from the top mass to the bottom mass from 6 Hz to 35 Hz. We are still plagued by an unknown noise bump between 15 Hz and 100 Hz that may be coming from the PSL (It is not in the VCO). This will study this further next week.

Laser Amplifer for PSL Power Upgrade

All components have finally arrived. We are studying how to properly align main beam through the amplifier and Faraday rotator for the single pass experiments, so as to aid in the double/quad pass ones.

Data Analysis and Computing (Lazzarini)

Simulation and Modeling (Yamamoto)

QuadFP (Hiro)

Modifying QuadFP, advLIGO high power arm simulation, to use modal field for ASC study is still going.

Stationary IFO Simulation (Hiro, Melody)

Building frame and builind SIS is still going.

Mechanics Simulation for Adv.LIGO (Sany Yoshida)

Based on Mark Barton's model, created an e2e box file to simulate the AdvLIGO Mode Cleaner's small optic suspension. Using Mark's  mathematica code, created a state space matrix and included it in the e2e box file. The results of the initial test with impulse inputs to the suspension point seem reasonable.

40m modeling (Monica)

PSD simulations have been performed with and without seismic noise in order to test the control loops.  Some changes in the LSC code have been made to try different strategies for the in-lock state (different error signals and DC signals).  The optical response of the full 40m has been simulated controlling the 5 degrees of freedom.

Data Analysis Activities (Lazzarini)

Brown:

  • Prepared APS talk on S5 BNS search
  • Learning about Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods for parameter estimation
  • Worked with Diego on physical template bank search
  • Working on EMRI project
  • Started looking at LISA supermassive black hole search
  • Wrote undergraduate colloquium for Whittier College

Chatterji:

  • Incorporating comments I have received regarding my APS talk and associate technical document on the early S5 online Q Pipeline search.
  • Continued development of Q transform based parameter estimation.
  • Identifying a potential three hour segment of S4 H1 h(t) data for a proposed initial data exchange with Virgo.

Dupuis:

  • analyzing recent S5 data (up to 8 April) for known pulsars
  • produced high resolution spectrograms of H1 and L1 data for March  (see at bottom of http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/~rejean/S5/j0537/ apr4/index.html)
  • verified absence of anomalous signals in some excitation channels
  • working on developing a code to fold the h(t) data to see profile of signals

Mandic:

I have completed the checks of the S4 all-sky stochastic analysis, requested by the review committee. This includes software injections, estimate of timing errors, bayesian analysis of the calibration uncertainty with different priors on Omega_GW, post-processing with different data quality cuts (and with no cuts at all) etc. The tests did not reveal any problems with the S4 all-sky stochastic result.

Mendell:

StackSlide S4 results for the April APS meeting will be (were) presented at the LSC telecon, Thu. Apr. 13, 2006.

Shawhan:

  • Reviewed pulsar analyses and S2 F-statistic paper.
  • Worked on my APS talk, and gave other people comments on theirs.

Sutton:

My main occupation this week was working on my APS talk covering the burst+stochastic searches.

I've been working on an improved power spectrum estimation algorithm for xpipeline.  The improved algorithm is designed to follow the noise floor for broad frequency bins (our burst analysis works with very short integration times) and suppress the effect of strong narrow lines.

Yakushin:

  • Continue polishing APS presentation and participating in the preview telecons.
  • Continue testing and tuning the coherent waveburst version on S4 data.

LIGO Data Analysis System

Software Systems (Blackburn)

LDAS

Focused on getting all compression modes described in the frame spec working (PR#1828). Corrections to frameCPP have been made. Testing uses both frameCPP and FrameL to verify the correctness of the encrypted data. The data has been decrypted and compared to the original data. Errors discovered with FrameL during this process have been reported to the Virgo group for correction. The 64-bit versions of the code still need testing.

Discussed tools and techniques needed to migrate 32 bit framebuilder code to 64 bits with Alex Ivanov and Rolf Bork. Will need to prepare a 64 bit version of the frameCPP for CDS once the testing mentioned above is completed.

TCLGLOBUS

Of the 46 function that comprise the Globus GSSAPI package:

  • 2 are not supported as they have declarations but no definitions
  • 44 have been documented and tested.
  • 4 remain to tested (gss_wrap, gss_unwrap, gss_mic, and gss_verify_mic)

GRID COMPUTING

Evaluated the distribution of OSG Production sites for batch system and cluster size at the request of the LSC Computing Committee. Top level statistics are:

Total Number of Sites:     52

Total Number of VOs:    25

Total Number of Batch Slots:    19078

Number of Condor Batch System Sites:    26

Number of PBS Batch System Sites:    18

Number of SGE Batch System Sites:    3

Number of LSF Batch System Sites:    2

Number of Unknown Batch System Sites:    3 (Probably fork job manager only)

The quantity of most interest to the CompComm was the fraction of sites using condor for the batch system (0.50), managing (0.38) of the resources.

Assisted system administrator at NERSC on supporting VDS on OSG NERSC- PDSF compute nodes.

Installed OSG release 0.3.7 on LIGO-CIT-ITB cluster and Installed VDS 1.4.4 on submit host. Experienced problems submitting the binary inspiral jobs after the client side upgrade. Have brought this to the attention of the VDS group but need to further evaluate before handing off to them for fix.

Validated three OSG 0.3.7 ITB sites with the Inspiral pipe application using previous version of submit tools from VDS.

Attended OSG telecom on OSG 0.3.7 validation results.

Hardware Systems (Anderson)

Caltech

(Phil Ehrens)

  • Added throttling code to log_mon.tcl and debugged the script further.  Documentation on wiki reflects the current state of the script accurately.
  • Updated wiki pages dealing with machine configuration issues for both Linux and Solaris machines.
  • Installed Solaris 10 update 1 on the Sun v40z machine in the ldas- dev system.
  • Installed FC4 on the Sun x2100 machine in the ldas-dev system.
  • Various certificate management tasks.

(Erik Espinoza)

  • Shipped 3 nodes to ASA Computer for repairs.
  • Configured Sun Opteron (v40z) for LDAS development.
  • Configured FC5 on Dell D610 and passed along info to Kent Blackburn.
  • Investigating update to BIOS for new Opteron cluster nodes (currently 1.0b, new version is 1.1), asking Supermicro for details.
  • Assisted Phil in deployment of Sun x2100 for LDAS development.
  • Node68 crashed due to bad memory. Subsequently a hard disk died. The machine is now running.
  • Node11 died, talking to tech @ ASA Computer. Machine moved to the end of address space (node325).
  • Installed Linksys Gig-E 24 port switch w/ Stuart.
  • Moved Temptrax to rack w/ Linksys.
  • Tracing NIS+/Glibc bug (FC4 w/ Latest Update). Filed bugzilla #188761.
  • Sent contact @ Western Digital serial numbers for proper tracing.
  • Working on ldas-kickstart for Livingston.

(Stuart Anderson)

  • Decommissioned two Foundry network switches and installed a new 24- port Cisco switch.
  • Reorganized some of the equipment in 215 Synchrotron so that two racks of old equipment are now free to be shipped to the Observatories.
  • Working with Dan to further characterize SAM-QFS performance after deleting several million files.
  • Reworked the S5 plots to monitor the delay in transferring frame files over the network (http://www.ldas-cit.ligo.caltech.edu/lag.html).

MIT

(Keith Bayer)

  • Rebooted ldas-pcdev1 & ldas-sundev1 with updated packages

Livingston

(Igor Yakushin)

  • Due to the fire outside the site, we had a several hour power outage on Tuesday. Since we got an advanced notification of the event, the LDAS equipment was cleanly shut down before the outage happened.
  • There is a tape (LLO0938) stuck in the drive 44 of the tape robot.  SUN technician should come to repair it today.
  • T3 disk u1d9@t1 failed and was replaced with a spare.
  • Downloaded WNB1_BN_S5 burst MDC frames from PSU to LLO and CIT.

(Dwayne Giardina)

  • Ejected tapes for shipment to CIT and imported tapes into L700.
  • T3 disk u1d9@t3-1 failed, replaced with u1d8 from spare T3-13, rebuilt raid array on T3-13.
  • Ejected tapes for storage and imported tapes into L700.

Hanford

(Ben Johnson)

  • LHO site-wide power outage (unplanned) occurred this past Sunday. The LDAS systems ran out of UPS power, but there were no hardware faults caused by the outage. Software is currently running.
  • I have found *no* CRC mismatches at LLO or LHO that were not associated with either a front-end or framebuilder reboot, since Alex started testing his new code.
  • Talked with Chris Messenger about GEO segment publication. My two action items are to send him information about the bulkpublishstate scripts, and to send him and Martin Hewitson info about inserting their own/correcting GEO data quality information.
  • Got the old SunBlade 100 (old admin machine) running Sol10 U1. I was also able to get it to use Sun's Update Manager in sort of the "public" mode (a.k.a. no support contract required).

General Computing (Wallace)

Lazzarini/Roddy

A new version of the LIGO Computer Use Policy has been signed by the Directorate.  It is available from the DCC at http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/docs/M/M020105-04.pdf.  Jay and Stan will circulate an announcement in the near future to LIGO Laboratory personnel.

MIT

(Keith)

  • Ordered backup server
  • Working on misbehaving windows laptop
  • Working on linux/sun automounting
  • Visitor support
  • Configuring printing support on new linux opteron box
  • Ordered various spare parts
  • Added new urops to gc: Forrest Funnell, Brian Pepper

Livingston

(Dwayne)

  • Delivered almost finished PC to Janeen.  Email setup remaining.
  • Site power outage on Tuesday.  Brought down some essential GC servers after realizing power would not be restored before batteries were drained.  Did not get all shut down cleanly before batteries supporting KVM and monitor failed.  When power returned, most came back online OK.  However, there were problems with DNS server loading NIC drivers.  With Shannon and Tom, we were able to resolve the problem.
  • Installed and configured ntpd (Network Time Protocol Daemon) on abundance.
  • Apache2 VirtualHost problems on support.ligo-la. Commented out a couple lines in config file and restarted apache.
  • other usual user requests and support

(Shannon)

  • Attended Educause security conference.
  • Working on router and IDS with Dave Barker.

Hanford

(Christine)

  • On Sunday morning a crow going after eggs in another bird's nest flew in to the power transformer for the site and caused a power outage.  Once power was restored all of the GC network and computers came back on their own without any problems.  I did have to run fsck on two file systems on two servers.  Only other problem was that when the phone vlan was added to the GC switch, the configuration was not saved to memory.  As the phones came back online they started taking IP addresses from the GC DHCP server.  As soon as the phone vlan was re-entered and saved to memory this time, I was able to release the IP addresses on the GC DHCP server.
  • Updated the security patches on the mail server.
  • Still working on the MRTG graphs of the network bandwidth.
  • Finished reworking the FY06 GC budget.
  • Started preparation to setup an IDS and port monitoring system.
  • Writing a PR to purchase more disks for the user directories and an updated backup system.

CIT

(Veronica)

  • LSC:  Prepared the website for the June meeting.  Installed the scripts and the backend for the registration and the online credit card processing application.  Updates to the database of the LSC-reviewed papers.  Update of the LSC website and LSC-related mailing lists.  Updates of the March meeting presentations list.
  • LIGO:  Updates of the CIT and MIT homepages.  Support of the upcoming AdvLIGO review.  Videotaped a presentation by Kenji Numata and burned DVDs for Kip's group.  Helped Julie with setup of Jay's website.  Updates of the roster database and mailing lists.

(Christian)

  • Linda turner - Finished transferring all of Linda's files and settings back to her original laptop.
  • Millikan - Replaced black toner cartridge on HP 5500 printer Ken Mailand - Restored missing files on a test workstation for Ken.
  • I did an inventory on printing supplies.
  • I'm working on updating all of the visitors' workstation with the standard Ligo image.
  • Other misc.: Continued onsite software/phone support.

(Mike)

  • Finished up DCC Dual core server. This server is now ready for production. I spent a lot of time trying to get ghost to work on these servers; using the SATA controller card & hard disk that came pre-loaded with this server did not work. I ended up installing an IDE hard disk using an IDE slot on the motherboard. I am now able to use the ghost software to back up the OS. I am using this same configuration for the PDMWORKS server.
  • Started configuring another Dual core server to replace PDMWORKS server. I am working on getting the VaultData moved over, and installing PDMWORKS Server side software. This is an on going project.
  • Doing research on how to backup the PDMWORKS Vault. So far it looks like there is know way to backup and restore individual files from the Vault. The only way to insure you have a reliable backup, you must stop the PDMWORKS service, and then copy over the VaultData directory to another source. I have created a DELETE project with in the Vault for Solid Works users to move files they know longer need, rather than deleting them. I have also disabled the delete option to insure data is not deleted by accident. I am still doing more research on this.
  • Continued work on the Spam Filters, searching for false positives.
  • Came across some issues with the mail servers, after many attempts running scripts and killing processes I ended up having reboot both servers.  This was a last resort. Everything seems to be running OK for now.
  • Other misc. user support.

(Larry)

  • Worked a number of procurements. Started getting things together for the SUN matching grant purchase.  Found a few new items to look at before making the purchases for conference equipment. Always something new coming out.
  • Worked on a number of DCC issues. Presently, part of the file system is mirrored at another location in order to improve performance for web access to the documents. This process will continue until the new DCC system is up and running.
  • Worked a couple of document issues. Helped in making changes to the updated AUP document. Everyone will be required to reread the document and sign off on it when it goes out.
  • Spent part of the week attending the Educause conference. It was good to meet a number of others having the same issues and checking out their solutions. Spam and phishing were two of the top subjects discussed. Overall we are pretty much in-line with other educational institutions as far as solutions being used.  It would have been nice to have representatives there that are involved with large labs or projects similar (in size) to LIGO.
  • Assisted Mike with his various projects.
  • Worked a couple of mailserver issues. Helped Mike take care of a process problem.

Mail Statistics for April 6-12, 06

Mail Statistics

April 13, 2006

Rejected Messages

42,762

Virus Messages

2,097

Accepted Messages

58,095 (many spam messages getting through)

Total Messages

90,857

 

Advanced LIGO and Supporting R&D (Shoemaker)

Advanced LIGO Systems, Management

From: Dennis Coyne coyne@ligo.caltech.edu

Kickoff of work with vendor for fabrication of HAM-SAS.

From: Carol Wilkinson <wilkinson@ligo-wa.caltech.edu>

Performing Monte-Carlo studies of cost and schedule.

Seismic Isolation

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

Installation of integrated quad suspension and seismic spacer in LASTI.

Suspension

From: Janeen Romie romie_j@ligo.caltech.edu

Advanced LIGO Suspensions

Working on NSF Review material. Still have more to submit. Hope to get to it today.  Dwayne has installed Solidworks, Algor and Ansys on my desktop. I hope to start working on it very soon, so that Dwayne may uninstall & reinstall Solidworks on my laptop.

Working with Calum and the others at MIT. I will be going there with Mark Barton next week.

From: Jay Heefner jay@ligo.caltech.edu

LASTI HEPI

  • Binary IO board received. Chassis assembly started.
  • Anti-Image Interface board design completed and set out for fab.
  • Anti-Image front panel designed and will be sent out for fab tomorrow.
  • Preparing for an early May installation.

AdL Quad Controls Prototype

  • Supporting testing of quad controls using LIGO control system installed last week.

Core Optics

From: Helena Armandula ahelena@ligo.caltech.edu

LIGO I COC's

Shipped 2ITM04 and 3 - 1"dia. mirrors for scatter characterization.  Cleaning up files and placing backed up LIGO I documentation in the DCC.

Silicate bonding

Participated in a telecon with C. Cantley and Norna giving technical support to Supriyo Sinha(from Stanford) on details of silicate bonding procedures. The telecon was followed-up with an interchange of E-mails.

Pre-Stabilized Laser

From: Peter King pking@ligo.caltech.edu

I have managed to get the Xilinx software going and talking to a Simulink model but have not gotten a filter to work yet.

Otherwise I have been scanning in vendor quotations for the up-coming baseline review.

Auxiliary Optics

From: Michael Smith <smith@ligo.caltech.edu>

TCS

I completed a conceptual design in ZEMAX for Hartman sensor beams in the non-folded IFO to sample the ITMs and the BS from within the recycling cavity, and the HR faces of the ITMS. I have added the Hartman sensor beams into the SW layout of the vertex.

WBS

I am in the process of updating the AOS WBS dictionary.

Controls, Data systems

From: Rolf Bork rolf@ligo.caltech.edu

  • We installed the new quad controls at Lasti this past week.  Equipment included a PCI-X I/O chassis w/ADC and DAC modules, a dual Opteron front end controller, and a new FrameBuilder. The new timing system was also installed.
  • We are continuing to work on the new Hepi system, which we plan to install the week of May 8. We will also be installing the new Myrinet network switch (new net is already operating between the quad controller and Framebuilder, but without a switch). I have a GPS network time server on order as well, which has a one pps output to run the new timing system. This should allow us to remove all remaining VME equipment on the next visit.
  • We are adding software to support FIR filters in the front end controllers, similar to the standard IIR filters that were developed for LIGO.  We plan to support standard FIR filters, polyphase FIR filters and adaptive filters. At least the first two will be ready for the HEPI code install in May. The adaptive filters will probably come later.
  • Continuing to work on the software which generates realtime front end and EPICS code from MatLab files. While this software successfully generated the code for the quad suspension, it still needs to support more parts, such as polyphase FIRs, to produce the HEPI software.

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