Weekly Report for Week Ending May 11, 2006

Due to the LIGO Staffing Committee Meeting May 15, 2006, there will be no LIGO Executive Committee meeting scheduled that day.

Special Announcements:

Weekly Report Highlights

Livingston reaches noise level corresponding to a ten thousandth the size of a proton!

LSC Issues (Saulson)

No report (vacation).

LIGO Laboratory Administration (Lindquist)

STATUS OF LSC MOUs (Lloyd)

LSC MOUs and Research Plans and Progress Reports

  • No report this week.

SITE TELECONFERENCE (Lindquist)

A brief site teleconference was conducted Thursday, May 11, 2006.  The following were among the items discussed:

  • The Livingston Science Education Center (SEC) is holding schedule.  The week saw a spate of detector disturbance because of trenching for the various water lines and the heavy equipment involved.  This is expected to be completed this week.
  • There are no open assigned actions.  The list of assigned actions updated through December 1, 2005 (the last time that it was updated) will be found Here.

PROPERTY MANAGEMENT (Luna)

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

  • Worked with personnel at Washington State University to finalize the loan agreement for 63 Cluster Nodes and 3 racks.
  • Prepared a list of items that need to be tagged due to Oracle Problems that affected government purchases from FY'02 to FY'06.
  • Provided assistance to the General Computing Group with the packing and shipping of 2 Laptops and 3 Projectors for the LSC meeting @ MIT.  Account Number LIGO.DIR 1.1.1 NSFLIGO.FY02ON.

DOCUMENT CONTROL CENTER (Turner, Mak)

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

  • Held several discussions with various LIGO staff regarding design issues for the Synergy software.  These issues centered on the overall storage hierarchy submitted documens.  A draft has been cut and submitted to FileHold for review.  A meeting is scheduled early next week with Ian Booth of FileHold.  We want to ensure that the document profiles, which contain the fields required for capture of the metadata, provide the necessary data for the Synergy software to automatically file the document in the correct location.

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

Week Ending

May 11, 2006

In

Out

Packages

25

12

Faxes

22

22
  • Processed another small handful of revised HAM drawings from Promec.
  • Completed processing large batch of confidential/sensitive documentation.
  • In the process of sorting/refiling those "P" documents that were extracted from the shelves for electronic scanning.
  • Scanning - Progress continues on scanning of contract closeout files.

COST SCHEDULE CONTROL SYSTEMS (Cunningham, Brambila, Kaufman)

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

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

  • Completed the purchase of the new Chevrolet vehicle for Hanford, and requested for the check to be delivered by 5/10/06 so that delivery could be coordinated with the trade-in of the vehicle. The check was federal expressed on Monday 5/8/06.
  • Completed change order #3 to Nor Cal Products for the base plates and chambers for MIT. Submitted the order to the vendor. Received the signed modification and order acknowledgement.
  • Working on the change order to University of Michigan and the change order to Promec.
  • Updated the subcontract database to reflect the recent grant amendments.
  • The MIT order for the six month allocation has been routed from Legal Counsel to the AVP office.

>From: Florence Kaufman <fkaufman>

  • Completed reports for the Visitor Award and the Outreach Awards as of the end of April.
  • Completed and sent out reports for the Hanford Conference Account, the Hanford and Livingston Discretionary Awards, the Low Noise Award and the MIT Grid Awards.
  • Prepared an analysis of various amounts related to the Exploratorium Purchase Order.
  • Prepared two Cost Transfers for expenditures incorrectly charged to the Visitor Award when it should have been charged to the Ops Award.
  • Responded to Project Accounting's request for budget realignments required in both the Ops and Outreach Awards.  These realignments merely change the Oracle budget at the project level, total budget for the Award is not effected.  These realignments are required whenever the expenditures in a Project number exceed the budget assigned in Oracle for that Project Number, so that NSF can be requested for reimbursements based on expenditures made, because the Caltech billing system does not allow for billing in costs in excess of budget at the project level.
  • 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 LLO Science Education Center (SEC) remains on schedule, although there was some extra effort required in the connection of water, fire, and sewage lines. These issues have been resolved, and the construction continues as planned.
  • The contract with the Exploratorium for the LLO SEC exhibits is being modified to add the final set, Group C, which consists of six exhibits.  This will add $128,000 to the contract total.
  • Work on the design prototype of the kinetic facade for the LLO SEC continues on schedule.  The prototype is scheduled to be reviewed in two weeks at the contractor's facility in Boulder, Colorado.

PROPOSALS and REPORTS (Lindquist)

  • Prepared budget models for Operations during and after the Advanced LIGO Program.  Provided to Stan for comment and modifications.
  • Prepared the monthly report for LIGO Operations and sent to the NSF.  We are going to have to start work on an Annual Report soon.

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, May 15.  All files for the Staffing Committee are up-to-date and posted on the SC web page.
  • Prepared numerous appointment and reappointment memos for various Visitors and Post Docs.
  • Preparing for the arrival of the REU students.

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 S5 Activities at LIGO Hanford Observatory (compiled by M. Landry)

Both IFOs met S5 goals this week, with H1 running at 87% duty cycle, 13-14Mpc, and H2 at 85%, 7Mpc.  Of note is that we have turned off useismic feedback on H1 as it appears to be costing us a few hundred kpc when true useismic noise is low.  This software and hardware path was modified for PEPI; investigations are underway.

Highlights from the elog are bulleted below:

  • offsite NDS requests that activated excitation test points (monitor points only, not AWG excitations themselves) took us out of science mode.  Methods to close this loophole are being reviewed.
  • two strange trucks drove near the mid and end X stations; the DOE was contacted and it turned out the drivers were well surveyors.  The surveyors have been reminded of policy to notify us if they drive near LHO, and we asked for any records of other S5 visits.  Data quality flags are being created by scimons.
  • fan 6 was exonerated as a killer of inspiral range
  • h1 AWG problems continue to require reboots; pulsars, which were often dropped in the last three weeks of running, are now off, so we watch test points for indication the cpu has failed
  • winds roughly orthogonal to the end station (about 72 degrees to the x-axis, i.e. nearly in the y-direction) appear to drive seismometers 5 times more in x than in y.  More here.  The result is suprising and calibrations and orientations will be confirmed in followup studies (one such study: EY anemometer realigned by 120 deg).
  • new DMT code monitoring RMS strain was loaded
  • PEM injections were made on both IFOs
  • the 4k FSS glitches returned, and ISS/FSS cross coupling was investigated
  • 4k MC and CM loop transfer functions were obtained
  • the 4k optical gain goes off during long lock stretches
  • As GEO has joined S5 full time, GEO status is being imported into the control room

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

Last week was quite a roller coaster ride. As we left our cliffhanger last week, the Y arm input test mass (ITMy) had hung itself up on 5/2 during unusually intense construction activity. Daredevil HEPI stunt flying failed to shake it loose by Thursday evening, so we mobilized for an emergency vent on Friday 5/5. The mirror was found unharmed and in good spirits, but lightly wedged between its limit stops; it was easily liberated. We were back under vacuum by Friday evening, degassed a little over the weekend, and back in Science mode Monday night. Less than a week, soup to dessert.

The LLO team deserves highest recognition for flawless professionalism, tireless dedication and (gulp) nerves of steel. These guys are awesome.

But wait, there's more: the noise and inspiral range got better after the vent!

An unknown noise term has polluted our low-frequency spectrum for over a year, defying efforts to understand it and robbing 2 or 3 Mpc off our range. Somehow the events of last week made it drop away. It's clear we will learn something very deep from this, just not yet sure what.

One compelling theory (due to Rai) is that we had enhanced dissipation and corresponding force noise due to surface mobility of static charges, perhaps generated between the mirror and the stops during prior "bump" events. This particular mirror had kind of a reputation for bumping.

It's worth reflecting that our noise level corresponds to a ten thousandth the size of a proton; nobody's been here before.

Meanwhile, we'll take it. 14+ Mpc inspiral range, in essentially perfect agreement with our computed noise budget. Check out the 5/11 LLO ilog.


All of which serves as a great welcome and introduction for our new local run coordinator, Igor Yakushin...

L1 in S5 (Yakushin)

  • On Tuesday May 2 ITMY mirror got stuck.
  • Attempts to unstuck it without going inside failed.
  • On Friday May 5 the commissioning team went inside and unstuck the mirror.
  • On Monday May 8 evening the vacuum was restored in the chamber with ITMY and L1 rejoined S5 run.
  • As a bonus, we got our inspiral range increased to about 13-14 Mpc and the noise below 100Hz reduced.
  • However, L1 occasionally loses lock without any apparent reason and generates glitches each few minutes.  So there is some work to do to make it stable and increase duty cycle which was about 30% during recent days.

#MZ 5/12: It looks like the stability issues may have been at least partly resolved last night by some tuning of marginal loop parameters and an ISC table realignment.

L1 CDS (Bogue)

  • fb0 had hardware failure.  Worked with sun engineering to troubleshoot the problem and get it repaired.  While fb0 was down, it was necessary to move its disk array over to fb1 so that we could get dmt working again.  Thanks to Dwayne and Dan Kozak for their help with that.
  • Reprogrammed the IP numbers on the true time.  Had a long discussion with Szabi about our timing system and where the truetime fits into it.
  • Designed new web pages for cds.  Working closely with the operators to get the main page swapped over to the new design.  Once the main page is swapped, the other pages can be migrated as time allows.

LLO Outreach (Thacker)

  • Developed and conducted outreach program for ST. Jude School 5/8
  • Developed and conducted outreach program Victory Academy 6th grade 5/10
  • Developed and conducted outreach program Pine View Middle School 5/11
  • Accepted delivery for and set up remaining 5 exhibits from Exploratorium Group B.
  • Set up Directorate teleconference and reviewed minutes for posting.

#MZ: We have now received 30 interactive exhibits, of which 7 are on temporary loan at Southern. 6 more are on order for October delivery.  We have received preliminary assessments regarding pedogical effectiveness. The executive summary goes something like "THEY ROCK!!!!!"

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

Advanced LIGO Suspensions

Bob Taylor has agreed to a goal of Tuesday, May 16th for delivery of new osem cables to LASTI. Dave Ottaway and the LASTI Crew have agreed to finish the required testing of the quad by June 12th. These results are needed for the quad review by the UK group. Discussion on the details of the remaining tests will take place at the SUS meeting this coming Tuesday.

Completed the SUS NSF dry run presentation yesterday with Norna. Carol, Dwight, Norna, Justin and I have a meeting this morning about the costs and schedule. The final viewgraphs will be submitted to David by Wed, May 17th. The comments from the dry run reviewers were very helpful and welcome.

LLO Science Education Center Kinetic Art Project

HPD have closed most, if not all, of the actions that came out of the PDR. They are moving forward on schedule, as is the building construction. On May 23rd, we will go to Boulder to see and review the prototype.

LIGO computing and network security (Roddy)

  • last of the AUP emails are trickling in.
  • The network went down again yesterday.  This time Bell South rolled to two new fibers between the Livingston and Denham COs at ~21:30 last night.  We'll see if this fixes it.  I was not contacted this time before the circuit went down.  In general they always contact me before they do any intrusive maintenance/repairs.  If nothing else it would have let me know what was going on last night when we went down.  I made a couple plots to compare to the outages from two years ago.  They look almost identical, though I am not sure the problem is identical.
  • Still working on the web server replacement.
  • ordered various bits of hardware, books, etc.
  • working with Charter still on a quote for a backup network connection
  • rebuilt a Dell workstation with a new hard drive, etc. for the scanner PC replacement.  Installed windows, office, scanner, card reader, etc.
  • made contact with a local IT Security company and made inquiries into working with them on network audits, etc.

General Computing and LDAS Support (Giardina)

GC

  • received a new PC for a user.  Installed Matlab and MS Office on it.  Took the hard drive from old PC, placed it in an external chassis, connected it to new PC and currently running virus scan on it. It is badly infected.
  • assisted Bonnie with new LLO website development
  • Bellsouth network dropped out again.  I have spoken with engineers on a possible backup solution, and will talk more with Shannon about this.
  • replaced two printer catridges
  • email config on a laptop for a user
  • multiple restarts of apache on web server
  • other usual user requests and support

LDAS

  • ejected tapes for shipment to CIT and imported and labeled new tapes
  • replacement motherboard for node99 is requiring case modifications and power supply wiring extension.  I have questioned if this is how we want to proceed, as we have more replacement motherboards that will cause the same problems, or do we want to order motherboards that fit our chassis.
  • searched for tapes that were ?mistakenly? ejected and re-introduced them to the library
  • continued working on a ganglia replacement to monitor our cluster statistics

Initial LIGO Detector Science & Engineering (Coyne)

No report.

40 Meter Interferometer (Weinstein)

IFO Commissioning

  • Rana and Monica moved the MC reflected beam line to the AP table, shortening the beam patch dramatically. They reduced the light hitting the PDs to a safe level, eliminating the need for a fast shutter. They then re-phased the RF demodulation and are able to lock the MC. Steve moved a ccd camera over to look at the MCR light. The WFSs were also moved, but they require new cables which are being made by Bob, and new Guoy telescopes which are being designed by Monica. Dan is working on 45-degree brackets for holding the WFS boxes so that the PD is a +, not x, as was done at LLO, to reduce some of the coupling between pitch and yaw. The MC WFS will need to be re-diagonalized.
  • The small AP table is now a bit more crowded, (containing the AP RF, SP, and MCR beam lines, and the MCT beam going to the PSL table), but still has room for the DC readout QPDs and a path for the squeezed vacuum beam line. There are no longer any beam lines going all the way to the SP table.

IFO Modeling

  • Monica is cleaning up her e2e simulation of the 40m. She succeeded in locking the simulation, using Osamu's seismic model. Optimization of sevo gains is in progress. She is also working on locking with DC signals at TRX and TRY.
  • Osamu is working on new length sensing schemes from ALIGO, using lower RF frequencies. It is harder to test such schemes at the 40m due to the short power recycling cavity, but he's trying to find such a scheme.

DC Detection and Vacuum Squeezing Development

  • Rob and Sam continue to put together and pre-align the DC readout beam line, in preparation for installation into the vacuum. We need to get a good NPRO for alignment and OMC locking.
  • Rob and Sam are working out an in-situ alignment procedure for the DC readout beam line after installation, using an NPRO (to be borrowed from somewhere) and a fiber feed.
  • Osamu touched up the MZ alignment. There's a lot more reflected light when in lock, because the modulation depths have been turned up to make IFO locking easier.
  • We tentatively plan to install the DC readout beamline in the vacuum in the 3rd week in July, when Rob comes back from his honeymoon. Bob can have everything cleaned and baked before then.
  • The DCPD/OMMT Satellite box has been stuffed by P.R. and Ben is testing it now. Everything seems to be working well, but Ben wants to make a comprehensive test procedure for it to make sure that it all works well.
  • Ben is working on the front panels for the DCPD/OMMT box. They should be done soon.
  • Ben is finishing the schematics and layout for the QPD Whitening board.
  • It is believed/hoped that Jay is working on the design of the steering mirror PZT driver board and OMC PZT driver board, as well as the new AA and DAC interface boards for the PCIX-based controls.
  • Ben made retaining clips for the OMMT mirror to replace the clips that came with it. The original clips were much too big, and covered a large portion of the mirror surface. The replacement clips are made from titanium, and are much smaller than the originals.
  • Go and Evgueny are optimizing the SHG; they are getting 620 MW of green light. "Seeing the green come out of nowhere is very beautiful." - Rana. This higher power makes it harder to acquire lock, and they are trying different methods to make it easier. They also installed the pump beam path into the OPO. They are generating green light in the OPA as well, to help guide the pump beam. They are also observing daily alignment drifts; this may be due to the MOPA trips (see below), or something else drifting upstream. They are investigating.

PSL

  • We started seeing laser head temperature hiccups around 2 weeks ago. Osamu thought they were consistent with PSL enclosure trip-offs. Steve did a controlled test, opening the PSL enclosure when it was interlocked, and saw precisely the same kind of hiccup. Either the enclosure is getting bumped, or an enclosure sensor/relay is getting flaky. Steve will try to locate a flaky sensor/relay. Meanwhile, the bumps should set off an alarm; this will be re-enabled. And an interlock trip-off should not trip off the MOPA. Steve will look for a softer way to provide the personnel protection.

Electronics, Controls, Computers

  • Dan ran a new heliac cable to the 33 MHz pockels cell, to replace a broken one.
  • Ben ordered 6 of the YAG-444-4AH (the RoHS compliant version) PDs from Pacer. Four are for the 40m, and two are destined for Livingston. Richard wrote that he had plenty, and didn't need any ordered for Hanford.
  • Front end test points continue to become unavailable for no apparent reason, requiring restarts of the c0daqawg processor.
  • We continue to have heaps of computer problems. Rob noticed that the RGAlogger hasn't been running for months, and the conlogger also needed to be restarted.

Thermal Noise Interferometer (Black)

After some thought and additional modeling, Dennis was able to explain the anomalous hump in the noise floor with the o-ring-dampers installed. It seems there are mechanical modes of the o-rings themselves at a few kilohertz, and what we were seeing was the low-Q, on resonant thermal noise of these modes.

Based on Dennis' model, we tried kapton tape in place of the o-rings.

The tape lays flat against the mirror and therefore presents very little mass to stick up and wiggle. This resembles the models of Gras, et al., who modeled ring dampers as essentially massless strips of loss, much more than the o-ring does. While we were doing the experiment, Dennis was also working on a finite-element model for the kapton tape, using the material properties of kapton and our TNI mirror dimensions. This model will not be as good as it sounds, since we do not know the material properties of the adhesive that sticks the tape to the mirror, but it ought to be at least close.

While the o-rings were very good at damping the mirror Q's, they also increased the broadband noise floor. The kapton tape proved less destructive in terms of noise (the noise floor returned to the coating thermal noise level), but it was also relatively ineffective at damping the mirror Q's. Q reductions ranged from none to 50%, depending on the mode.

LASTI (Ottaway)

No report.

Data Analysis and Computing (Lazzarini)

Simulation and Modeling (Yamamoto)

Advanced LIGO LSC/ASC design using e2e (Hiro)

Matt wrote a setup to study the lock acquisition issue of AdvLIGO,  using a FP arm. This is consisted of a adv.LIGO BSC, double chain quad pendulum and a FP cavity.  His focus was mainly LSC design to study the required force on ETM.

The setup has been expanded to study ASC/LSC in a more realistic condition. New setup now includes the radiation pressure and uses modal model, instead of plane wave. The quad pendulum model was replaced by one which is based on the new reference design, from the old model based on 2003 design. Several WFSs in front and one QPD beyond ETM have been attached.

There was a meeting held, Rana, Vuk, Osamu and Hiro, to discuss how to proceed using this setup to design and test LSC/ASC. Physics issues discussed were:

  • Main missing piece is ASC.
  • Local dumping design is very primitive, and assumes that ETM and ITM can be actuated in the same way.
  • Locking process, even at very low power input, needs ASC to make the in-lock state stable. Strong local dumping will make this locking process easier.
  • It was suggested that the code is modified so that filter specification format used at the site/40m can be read in directly to the simulation code.

Hiro is cleaning the setup, together with a simple documentation and example scripts.  It was found that, in order to simulation the test mass motion with enough accuracy at high frequency region, > 10Hz, the statespace calculation needs to be carried out using quad precision.  This is because the frequency dependence is ~ 1 / f^8 in the high frequency region, together with several high Q resonances in the low frequency region.  During this work, a gcc bug was found which has to do with the allocation of array of long double. It could be gcc 4.1 issue, not quite identified yet.

Advanced LIGO Mechanics modeling (Sany)

Completed e2e analysis of suspension point to optic's yaw coupling for AdvLIGO quad suspension. The computations were made using Mark Barton's most recent model (20060331 as built off-diagonal model). For comparison, the same computations were repeated for a completely symmetric case (keeping other parameters the same). When the symmetry is assumed, only suspension point Yaw (of the six degrees of freedom) is coupled to the optic's Yaw, as expected.  With the actual asymmetry (based on the most recent design) taken into account, the computation shows slight coupling from suspension point X (normal to the optic surface) and Roll to the optic's yaw. However, the magnitudes of the corresponding transfer functions are on the order of 1e-10 or less, indicating that the couplings are effectively negligible.

40m modeling (Monica)

The 40m configuration using the Osamu seismic model has been tested : the in-lock state is kept for the 5 degrees of freedom, but without radiation pressure. This will be tested next.  Trying to get the in-lock state for the 5 degrees of freedom using the transmitted power at the end mirrors to build CARM and DARM error signals : still under investigation.

Modeling code (Bruce, Melody)

A new version of e2e, 3.1.6 released which is needed to simulate the latest QuadFP package.

Melody helped Rana to install e2e package on his laptop.  She helped Hiro to properly create a distribution tarball. A proper process needs to be taken to include all changed made properly included in the tarball.

Bruce is working on improving the input and output parts of the modeler code.

ALFI (Bruce, Melody)

Melody

  • Continuing with the ALFI enhancement to have "comment" notes in an  edit window.   Currently working on the GUI portion.
  • Made a bug fix for the Rename option (not to write the DISPLAY  setting for all nodes, only the ones with non-default settings).

Bruce

  • Analysis of a bad Alfi bug which can cause Alfi to crash after the setting of two identical instance nodes are made (PR 541).

Data Analysis Activities (Lazzarini)

Brown

  • working in fixing problems with black hole ringdown analysis pipeline
  • meet with Diego to discuss his progress with the physical template family search
  • continued review duties for S3/4 inspiral BBH review
  • made detailed plan for Alex's SURF project
  • discussed data access in the control room with Stuart and John Z
  • tested new LDG 4.0 build for Stuart

Chatterji

  • Investigating minute trend data from environmental channels to exclude periods of erroneous data from veto studies.
  • Reorganizing X Pipeline CVS repository to prepare for open science grid feasability studies
  • Continued investigation of chirplet extensions to the Q Pipeline.
  • Drafted proposal for dedicated detector characterization workstations in LIGO control rooms.

Dupuis

  • working on building multi-detector frequency-spindown maps for first 6 months of S5 for certain pulsars
  • preliminary results show that:
    • we have beat the spindown limit for the Crab by a few percent
    • we are within a factor of 3.5 from the spindown limit for J0537-6910
    • we are within factor of 16 for J2124-3358 and constraining its ellipticity to less than 1.5e-7 (!)

Mandic

I continued working on the S4 all-sky stochastic paper. A draft has been reviewed by the review committee, and by others, and I am in the process of making the suggested changes to the paper.

I am also working with X. Siemens on the accessibility of the cosmic strings models to the LIGO stochastic search.

Mendell

An update on the StackSlide S4 analysis was given at Tuesday's CW telecon and posted on the pulgroup S4 investigations page. A review is scheduled for tomorrow.

Shawhan

  • Generating data quality flags for various conditions (out-of-lock at ends of segments, light dips, suspension controller overflows) for the period February 7 through May 2.  I have had to deal with missing trend frame data; I ended up writing a program to re-generate trend frames from raw frames, and am currently running it to generate trend data for selected LLO channels over a four-day interval in March.
  • Sorted out estimates of Burst Group computing needs with Albert Lazzarini and Erik Katsavounidis.
  • Drafted a charter for the Burst Group with Erik Katsavounidis.

LIGO Data Analysis System

Software Systems (Maros)

LDAS

Continued working on having the diskcacheAPI being robust to NFS file systems that are not available (PR#3015).

Nearly completed the explicate setting of the version of tclsh used by tcl scripts. This allows for tclsh to come from some other source than /ldcg/bin/tclsh and is part of the 64-bit port.

The "Test All Cmds" option from cmonClient's Test menu has been made more reliable by adding timeouts to each of the scripts used by the command.

System tests were done using version 1.8.72 of LDAS.

TCLGlobus

The web pages have been updated for 1.0.0 release of tclglobus. The source code distribution is available and the RPM will be made available once built and tested against LDG 4.0.

GRID COMPUTING

The prototype of the WorkFlow GUI has most of the functionality for saving basic workflow characteristics.

Tested srmcp commands with latest release of srmcp and DRM 1.2.11. 

Several commands are not working including tests from a Dcache to the DRM.  Requested use of the FNAL development Dcache for interoperability tests.

Attended bi-week TG-Storage meeting. Requested the VDT support people help determine what version of VDS they provide so that coordination with FC4 glibc releases can be accomplished.

Hardware Systems (Anderson)

Caltech

(Dan Kozak)

  • Normal S5 tape ingestion stuff.
  • Fixed file that wasn't staging on ldas-cit and staged it on dataserver-cit so MIT could continue pulling data via LDR.
  • Working on re-adding SFTs to CIT's collections.ini (had to remove them to get LDR to work at all).
  • Determined which tapes to eject for shelf storage at LHO.
  • Posed question to sam-managers list about getting metadata information out of a samfsdump file (no good answers yet).
  • Set up script at LHO/LLO to collect information about virtual memory, I/O and processes when we get a "Shared server not responding" message in the /var/adm/messages log.
  • Helped Lisa Bogue at LLO mount the /fb0_frames on fb1 while fb0 was down with hardware problems.  Also coached the reversal of this once the machine was repaired.

(Phil Ehrens)

  • Added per-machine sorted logging to log_mon.tcl report facility.  This is still in the testing phase.
  • Spec'd and ordered sound insulation foam and installation adhesive to be installed on inside doors of cluster room.
  • Investigated strange of attempts to mount /home/condor on various desktop machines. No conclusion reached.  Resulting log entries look like:  automount[4142]: lookup(nisplus): lookup for condor failed: 
  • Partial success automount[4142]: failed to mount /home/condor
  • Drilled metal ears for rackmount installation of foundry switch salvaged from CACR.
  • Various GRID certificate related tasks.
  • Various cluster support tasks.
  • Various LDAS related tasks.

(Erik Espinoza)

  • One node crash, node216.
  • Completed ldas-kickstart for Livingston, shipping Fri (5/12).
  • Worked with AMD to get them involved in our node crashing situation.
  • Flashed nodes to BIOS v 1.1 w/ new settings for ECC Scrubbing.
  • Troubleshooting GC Print Server (Kuma).
  • Tested Development glibc & other development packages on frog.
  • Assisted Junwei Cao w/ iptables on frog.
  • Configured Condor on frog, David Meyers will be conducting testing.

(Stuart Anderson)

  • Continued testing of latest SAM-QFS patch continues to look good.
  • Continued stress testing of backup 3510 unit has resulted in Dan getting Sun to replace the chasis.
  • Working with Condor team to understand why Quill is not working.
  • Worked with Junwei to upgrade the LDAS-CIT cluster from LDG-3.5 to LDG-4.0.
  • Started loading all LIGO minute trend frames into the LDAS-CIT cluster.
  • Started investigating VMware.

Livingston

(Dwayne Giardina)

  • Ejected tapes for shipment to CIT and imported and labeled new tapes.
  • Searched for tapes that were ?mistakenly? ejected and re-introduced them to the library.
  • Continued working on a ganglia replacement to monitor our cluster statistics.

Hanford

(Greg Mendell)

  • I am continuing to work on SFT publication, and making LDR transfer of RDS and trend frames from the sites to CIT more robust.

(Ben Johnson)

  • I've re-installed the OS on 15+ nodes with kickstart. Despite having to go in and configure the BIOS on each one for network booting, it works very well.
  • Updated QFS on fb0 to 4.5.10.
  • Created a no-globus-on-client LDRdataFindServer.

General Computing (Wallace)

MIT

(Keith)

No report this week

Livingston

(Dwayne)

  • Received a new PC for a user.  Installed Matlab and MS Office on it.  Took the hard drive from old PC, placed it in an external chassis, connected it to new PC and currently running virus scan on it.  It is badly infected.
  • Assisted Bonnie with new LLO website development
  • Bellsouth network dropped out again.  I have spoken with engineers on a possible backup solution, and will talk more with Shannon about this.
  • Replaced two printer cartridges
  • Email config on a laptop for a user
  • Multiple restarts of apache on web server
  • Other usual user requests and support

(Shannon)

  • Last of the AUP emails are trickling in.
  • The network went down again yesterday.  This time Bell South rolled to two new fibers between the Livingston and Denham COs at ~21:30 last night.  We'll see if this fixes it.  I was not contacted this time before the circuit went down.  In general they always contact me before they do any intrusive maintenance/repairs.  If nothing else it would have let me know what was going on last night when we went down.  I made a couple plots to compare to the outages from two years ago.  They look almost identical, though I am not sure the problem is identical.
  • Still working on the web server replacement.
  • Ordered various bits of hardware, books, etc.
  • Working with Charter still on a quote for a backup network connection - Rebuilt a Dell workstation with a new hard drive, etc. for the scanner PC replacement.  Installed windows, office, scanner, card reader, etc.
  • Made contact with a local IT Security company and made inquiries into working with them on network audits, etc.

Hanford

(Christine)

  • Set up more laptops. Made a loaner laptop dual boot WinXP/FedoraC4.
  • Started getting user accounts and computers ready for SURF students and summer teachers. Started cleaning up the Computer User Room and Staging building office.  Updating some older computers and going through spare monitors to find ones that work.
  • Started cleaning out the server room to make room for new servers,disk system and tape drive.
  • All site staff have now signed off on the new Computer Use Policy.

CIT

(Mike)

  • Bridge Annex server room: installed an additional server in the rack with the new UPS.
  • Trouble-shot a LAN network connection for Rich Abbott. This turned out to be a faulty network HUB. Replace this with a new switch and ran a new network cable. Christian gave me a hand with this.
  • Look into a problem for Bruce Sears regarding his LINUX workstation.  This turned out to be a hardware issue. Larry and I took a look at this, which we ended up swapping him out with another LINUX box that I had pre-loaded with (Fedora core 4.)
  • DHCP Server: Ran out of IP numbers. Went through and freed up IP numbers that were not being used.
  • Spam Filters: Continued work on searching for false positives.
  • Some misc. user support.

(Christian)

  • 3flr W/B - Replaced toner cartridges on HP 5500 printer.
  • Created a backup of Julie Hiroto and Cindy Akutagawa laptop and workstation.
  • Worked on the Spam Filters with Larry Wallace.
  • Continuing working on updating all of the visitors' workstation this week.
  • Linda Turner- Corrupted profile in thunderbird. Created new profile and transferred back all of her email and folders .
  • Other misc.: Continued onsite software/phone support.

(Veronica)

  • LIGO: A website for the AdvLIGO NSF review. Updates to the website of the PAC meeting. Installed a new newsletter. Updates to the Elba website. Updates to the roster database. Prepared high-resolution images for several publishers. Working on the makeover of the LIGO homepage.  Updates to the current LIGO website. User support.
  • LSC: Updates to the upcoming meeting website. Updates of the technical papers database and the webpage of observational results. 

Maintenance of the LSC-related mailing lists.

(Bruce Sears)

  • Fix of iLog installation at LHO.          (0.5 days)

(Larry)

  • Worked a number of procurements for different groups. Still working on maint. contracts.  Delivered a number of items.  Arranged for a couple of people to have portable disk drives to backup their notebook computers.  Received a number of drives for distribution to those that travel and need a backup drive.  Tested out a new projector, the unit so far performs well.  Started working on the procurement for a couple of new UPS.
  • Cleaned up a number of accounts. Working on getting more accounts removed and trying to free up more disk space.
  • Sent out a reminder to those needing to signoff on the new AUP.  There are still about 20 more people that need to reply.
  • Continue work with the spam filters. We had a couple of spam storms but things held up.  Worked on a mail problem for Linda Turner with Christian. The large files she receives appears to cause her core mail file to become corrupted.
  • Assisted DCC with a number of different issues.
  • Worked a couple of web issues, mostly links needing to be updated.
  • General user support

Advanced LIGO and Supporting R&D (Shoemaker)

Advanced LIGO Systems, Management

Preparing for the NSF Review (May 31-June2).

Seismic Isolation

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

The final stage 1 subassembly has been completed. All three stages are built and ready for final assembly.

The test stand has been lowered to the assembly height and leveled. Stage 0 and the stage 2 optics table has been assembled onto the test stand.

There are still many locator, spring, and actuator parts which have not been delivered by Limerick Machine. These parts are 8 weeks late and we are trying to put pressure on them to deliver them.

An internal review of the advanced ligo seismic subsystem was held on 5/2. Several good comments have been received which will be added to the presentation.

From: Riccardo DeSalvo <desalvo@ligo.caltech.edu>

HAM-SAS

PROMEC Gianni

  • all drawings in construction done
  • cabling drawings still being reviewed/revised
  • added end stop to vertical movement to prevent damage to cabling
  • shipping crate drawings still pending
  • counterweight bell details urgent now by Monday -- Yumei & Dennis to calculate

Caletch/G&M: The contract reflecting the latest changes was done

Tecnoinox, Marcello

Problems with through penetration in weld samples potentially a serious problem: (Reminder: Allied Engineering & Hytec found it difficult to perform these welds and required special weld preparation).  The old know how was, partially retrieved and provided to Tecnoinox (example T970250-00 and C980468-00), the old technique involves TIG welding with heath barrier trenches to confine the heath in the welds, surface preparation techniques in the last few minutes before the welds, and using different gases atmospheres. There is consensus that the 5082 Aluminum used is the best choice, rather than the stiffer 6000 series alloys.  Tecnoinox has consulted welding experts and made several tests with a modified MIG and tried several suggestions as well as making TIG welds on thinner plates.  They have achieved what is at first sight some good results.  They are sending the samples to Caltech for evaluation where Yumei and Riccardo will perform micro-cutting and photography to certify the full penetration and non porosity of the weld.  They also send the samples to an Ultra-sound testing company.  There is still plenty of potential to solve the problem, otherwise we can always switch to stainless steel.

Some already machined parts have been sent through the cleaning process and have been sent to Eurolab, a company specialized in cleanliness tests.  Eurolab has visited G&M and collected the parts after discussing on the technique to be used and took samples of oils and other fluids that may have been in contact with the parts for possible back-tracing of the residuals.  They will perform FTIR tests in a bath.  They are not familiar with performing the test on large parts by pouring the solvent over the part and back in the tank, as done by LIGO, but will study it and perform.

The clean room has been ordered.

Ric suggests doing dishwater cleaning at G&M for small parts ­ if environmental problems like waste fluids can be solved. Can make the cleaning a more nimble operation. Cleaning chemistry should be in any case oversighted by Soldi. Large parts would still go to Soldi’s.

Fabrication Schedule: Chiara was busy with Eurolab’s visit and the welding problem and could not update the production status list. The list this time will appear on G&M web site. However everything seems to proceed as expected, with the exception of the end-stop modifications and the CW production that still waits for the design from Caltech. In any case not a critical item.

There is a chance that the welding problems may introduce some delay in the IP assembly, probably absorbable, while the GAS filters will be unaffected. Riccardo is scheduled to go to G&M to start partial assembly on the 21st of May. Riccardo and Dave O. will have a 4 working day overlap in mid June. By then the dirty assembly should be concluding and only some counterweight tests should be ongoing. G&M will consider the impact to the schedule of the welding problems and advise us. At the moment it appears that at worse Dave may have more work if the weld generate delays.

Valerio presented LVDT measurements: http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/~citsas/HAM-SAS/Weekly20060510.ppt.  Basically the resolution is sufficient, but some small improvements should still be implemented.  We will likely plan to have a coarse & fine mode of operation so that in the coarse mode the LVDT range is ~1cm and in the fine mode the range is ~2mm.  Ben Abbott taking charge of the electronics, made a meeting and will meet again with Virginio, Valerio and Riccardo to get Ben up to speed and discuss cabling, packaging, impedance matching, etc.

Other issues

  • Alberto Stochino and Peter Raffai working on magic wand and IP papers
  • John Wilson of Flomerics Thermal and Air Flow Consulting Services, following a visit of Riccardo at Flomerics, prepared a Quote for a BSC Chamber Airflow Study.  In evaluation.

Suspension

From: Janeen Romie romie_j@ligo.caltech.edu

Advanced LIGO Suspensions

Bob Taylor has agreed to a goal of Tuesday, May 16th for delivery of new osem cables to LASTI. Dave Ottaway and the LASTI Crew have agreed to finish the required testing of the quad by June 12th. These results are needed for the quad review by the UK group. Discussion on the details of the remaining tests will take place at the SUS meeting this coming Tuesday.

Completed the SUS NSF dry run presentation yesterday with Norna. Carol, Dwight, Norna, Justin and I have a meeting this morning about the costs and schedule. The final viewgraphs will be submitted to David by Wed, May 17th. The comments from the dry run reviewers were very helpful and welcome.

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

This week I spent a fair bit of time assisting people using my modeling software: Hiro, who's working on AdvLIGO actuation schemes, Sany, who's working on an integrated SUS/SEI model, and Ian Wilmut of Birmingham, who's investigating the behaviour of the adjustment mechanisms in his "marionette" quad prototype, and Rich Mittleman, who's working with the controls prototype.

I also tracked down more and better as-built numbers for the controls prototype. As I suspected, some of the mass numbers had been inappropriately rounded. Also, for historical reasons, the blade spring elastic constants had been expressed in terms of "uncoupled frequencies". (A UFC is the bounce frequency for a blade loaded with its share of just the one mass directly below (as opposed to of all the masses below it in the chain). It's useful as a rough estimate of the vibration isolation performance of a single stage.) Sure enough, the UFCs we had been using had been computed with as-designed masses and converted back to elastic constants with as-built number, introducing anerror. Norna and I have now settled on a final set of numbers, which will be circulated in the next day or so.

From: Ken Mailand kmailand@ligo.caltech.edu

I'm working on a lower quad installation arm concept, and a simpler part that may be used at the LASTI site, will send out an email for comments and input.

Core Optics

From: Bill Kells kells@ligo.caltech.edu

Prompted by the review of the COC "internal review" slides being passed around I have re-assesed the reqirements for the Adl COC in view of what we know now about LIGO I optics.  The requirements must be stated much more precisely, commesurate with the much tighter loss budget for the arm cavities (optics). It may be not (nearly) so simple to require that the AdL optics be polished "to the same level of precision" as was achieved in LIGO I.

One LIGO ITM (2ITM04 which was the "bad" 2k X itm which was replaced) was scanned for HR surface scatter (loss) at the LMA lab in Lyon. We received the (very nicely done !) results, have had a conference call explaining them, and have discussed their import within the OWG.  For comparison/control purposes LMA also similarly scanned 3 1" dia superpolished &HR coated test mirrors which we understood the loss of from "contamination cavity" measurements. It must be appreciated that the LMA scatterometer only senses loss in the micro-roughness regime (surface scales < 1mm).

These LMA results are puzzling in that they are hard to reconcile (in some respects) with our own scan (which also only probe the micro-roughness regime). For 2ITM04 they conclude a mean (over ~50cm^2 scanned) scatter loss of ~6ppm and more interesting an upper bound for the surface background (that is points where there is no enhanced scatter due to defects) scatter of ~2ppm. This is surprising since our OTF scans (of this same mirror) give a mean of 18ppm and a background of ~11ppm. In particular the factor >5 discrepancy in bacground is worrysome since that should be an invariant of the native surface polish and coating (i.e. not contaminated, as the mean of a large surface scan is, by the hard to determine point defect and dust scatter).

In addition they find no evidence that there is any anomalous point scatter intrinsic to the HR coating (as has been hypothesized to explain the "globular cluster" point scattering so evident in IFO operation for these optics). They their mean result of ~6ppm for the HR surface to be the true average scatter loss, whereas we find < 70ppm in IFO operation).

On the other hand the LMA results for the 3 1" superpolished, HR coated optics are not so far from what we measure. they find (average of 3) a surface background of ~5ppm, whereas we have typically found ~4ppm for such calibration optics.

It is their general opinion that these discrepancies are somehow all due to different levels of dust accumulated prior to the various scans being compared (and implicitly that our IFO operational scatter is dominated by dust) They have dramatic direct experience with such effects. But this is hard to reconcile with all our observations (i.e. freshly cleaned HR surfaces do not reduce to the loss levels they find, at least for ITM04).

From: Helena Armandula ahelena@ligo.caltech.edu

2ITM04 and Small 1"dia. Mirrors

Received the scattering data from LMA on 2ITM04 and three 1"dia. mirrors.  The full report is in the DCC OUT under doc. # C060061-00. After receipt of the report we had a teleconference with the Lyon folks to clarify details.  At this time we are fine tuning our understanding of the different implications.

Input Optics

From: David Reitze reitze@phys.ufl.edu

Electro-optic Modulation (Wan Wu, Guido Mueller)

  • We have started looking into various EOM designs using a single crystal to provide all modulation frequencies for the initial LIGO upgrade; developing FEM models to predict the behavior of the electric fields and aid in designing the electrode spacing.
  • continuing working on a laser intensity stabilization servo for the EOM noise measurements. Working on problems with the reference voltage offset. In addition, considering a digital servo based on IIR filter design.

IO Mechanical Design (Luke WIlliams)

  • Made a new layout for the Mach-Zehnder modulation to accommodate high power operation.
  • Created a revised layout for the AdvLIGO IO that uses single part assemblies to reduce the complexity of the drawing.  Continuing to add the auxiliary beams.
  • Starting to work on a vacuum compatible design for the Faraday Rotator.

IO MMT (Dave Reitze)

  • circulated a RODA to SUS specifying the physical dimensions of the MMT3 mirror.  Negotiating with SUS for final values of the dimensions

Thermal Compensation (Muzammil Arain)

  • Continuing on our search for negative dn/dT material, a new Glass from Schott (N-PK51) seems to be an alternative to CaF2. This glass has considerably lower thermal conductivity value of 0.92 W/(m-K). Also it is available in large sizes. We plan to buy some glass plates for characterization. In addition, a sample of CaF2 has been obtained and optical characterization experiments are underway.

Faraday Isolator (Ken Franzen and Simon Stepuk)

We have continued to study thermal lensing effects in a 100 W beam passing through the AdLIGO Faraday Isolator prototype two times. By positioning a DKDP crystal close to the FI (~ cm) followed by careful alignment and orientation we found that the beam appears to be rather decent (~ Gaussian). We are now trying to quantify these results more in detail.

NSF Review (Dave Reitze)

  • based on many useful reviewer comments, have revised IO cost and technical presentations for the May AdvLIGO review

Pre-Stabilized Laser

From: Peter King pking@ligo.caltech.edu

With Xilinx's customer support from Ireland, we established that one of the software packages I use is installed and working correctly.  Now it would appear that there is a bug with the evaluation version of the other software package that I'm using - the one allowing the Simulink interface to the hardware - in that it may not actually do any hardware interfacing.  The full-blown version does.  This should be resolved by the end of the week.

Auxiliary Optics

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

PO MIRROR

Chris Echols completed a preliminary SW model of the PO mirror bezel.

TCS

I have developed a ZEMAX model of amodified initial LIGO TCS CO2 laser projector for heating the Compensation plates in front of the ITMs for the non-folded IFO. I am adding a conceptual layout of the CO2 laser heater into the SW Vertex Layout drawing.

Controls, Data systems

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

LASTI HEPI

  • The conversion of the LASTI HEPI system to PCIX based LIGO controls is in progress and should be completed by the end of the week.

AdL SEI Internal Seimic Isolation

  • The backplane board and the interface board for the capacitive position sensors are due back this week. They will be stuffed and tested in the next two weeks. We will then have a full prototype of the capacitive position sensor interface chassis ready for test in LASTI.

From: mohana@ligo.caltech.edu

I am in LASTI this week. I am doing the HEPI installation with Jay and Rich. We put all the new electronics in and powered up the rack today.  All the cables are put in the the subsystems and we will test the HEPI electronics tomorrow with the software.

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