Weekly Report for Week Ending October 26, 2006

Past Weekly Reports

The LIGO Executive Committee Agenda for Monday, October 30, 2006 will be:

(Meeting time: 10:30 am Pacific Time)

Announcements

Programmatic (Marx)

• Summary of NSF Annual Review
• Budget discussion---Status and Wish List Items
• Comments on weekly report

LSC Issues (Saulson)

• Status of negotiations with Virgo on MOU

LIGO Lab Operations

• Administration (Lindquist)
• Sites (Raab, Zucker, Shoemaker)
• Commissioning (Fritschel)
• Optical and Mechanical (Coyne)
• Control and Data Systems (Bork)
• 40m (Weinstein)
• TNI (Libbrecht)
• LASTI (Ottaway)
• Lab computing ( Anderson )
• Science Group (Weinstein)

Enhancements (Adhakari)

Advanced LIGO (Shoemaker)

Change Control Board/Technical Review Board Session as needed

• No open change requests

Site and other Business Issues

Special Announcements:

Weekly Report Highlights - LHO is written up in local paper

LSC Issues (Saulson)

 On 20 October, the LIGO Directorate had one of its regular telecons with Virgo Spokesperson Benoit Mours. We made some good progress on some of the remaining outstanding issues on the MOU. (There will be a brief presentation on the status of MOU discussions at the Lab Excomm meeting on 30 Oct.).

Among the many ways that LIGO made a well-deserved good impression at this past week's NSF Review was the fine set of presentations on data analysis results. The committee was impressed both by the presenters and what they had to show: well-thought-out analyses that are (in many cases) keeping up with the S5 data. There was strong interest in understanding subtle points, so two breakout sessions were held to follow up on things beyond the initial presentations.

LIGO Laboratory Administration (Lindquist)

STATUS OF LSC MOUs (Lloyd)

• No report.

PROPERTY MANAGEMENT (Luna)

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

• No report.

DOCUMENT CONTROL CENTER (Turner, Mak)

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

• No report.

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

• The "Mega DCN" was put on hold for a few days as I was waiting for a response in order to proceed.  All the attached drawing files need to be renamed and transferred to their filing location.  Once this is done, it will finally be complete and ready for distribution.
• Processed a set of ADVANCED LIGO SUS N-PTYPE OSEM drawings.
• Continued to assist with the allocation process of documents for the database conversion.
• Scanning Update - Scanning of past year's fax transmission/activity reports is complete.  Scanning has begun on Travel Expense Reports.

FINANCIAL SYSTEMS (Funaro, Brambila, Kaufman)

>From: "Funaro, Catherine" <Catherine.Funaro@caltech.edu>

• For ACCOUNTS PAYABLE HISTORY DATA Press Here.

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

• Completed the internal fund transfer on Triad.
• Completed the new subcontract for RJ Booty and federal expressed to vendor.
• Completed change order #17 to Praxair and routed it for approval. Received the approved order and submitted to vendor.
• Placed orders for various goods and products for delivery to Caltech and the Observatories.
• Submitted the procurement package for Doug's laser order for Hanford and submitted it for approval.
• Ordered the flowmeter for Riccardo.  It will need to be exported to Italy .
• Working on the change order for Support Services for routing.
• Completed the order for the custom cable parts.

>From: Florence Kaufman <fkaufman>

• Requested a number of new account numbers and fabrication account requests.
• Worked on reports for October.
• 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>

• No report.

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

• Three proposals were received for the Advanced LIGO HAM Seismic Isolation System design and prototype.  The Evaluation Committee is scheduled to meet on Friday, October 27, to form a consensus recommendation to the Source Selection Official.
• The NSF Office of General Counsel has determined that income from the LLO Science Education Center bookstore/gift shop is "program income" under NSF guidelines, and, therefore, may be operated by Caltech personnel inside the facility.  Meetings will be scheduled with Caltech financial staff to review the rules for operating this shop, and scheduling training for appropriate LIGO staff.

PROPOSALS and REPORTS (Lindquist)

Nothing to report.

CHANGE CONTROL/CONTINGENCY MANAGEMENT (Lindquist)

• There are no open change requests.

HUMAN RESOURCES (Akutagawa)

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

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

Fallout from the recent Mt Rainier quake of Oct 7 (some 170km west of the lab) impacted both interferometers this week.  Previously (Oct 10) we had observed a drop in range on the 2k down to about 2Mpc, presumably due to ETM chargeup and/or mechanical hangup, and two trials of burp and shake in MY brought us back to 6Mpc.  Last Tuesday however, the 2k range spontaneously dropped again to 1Mpc.  Driving hard with coils released the optic, but the situation is unsatisfactory.  A near future vent of the MY station appears highly likely.  Furthermore, mechanical modes of the 4k ITMs suggested they too were suffering from chargeup since the Rainier quake, so the H1 vertex was partially vented.  While optic modes were mostly restored to their nominal frequencies, it is not at all clear the performance of the 4k IFO has improved.

Commissioning efforts included using more laser power on H1 (again, here).  As in prior attempts, increased power on H2 did not improve the range.

The result of vents and commissioning activity was significantly reduced duty cycles for the past week: 55% on H1, and 53% on H2.  Ranges too were in general lower than typical (~13Mpc on H1, ~6.5Mpc on H2).

Some S5/commissioning highlights from the LHO elog are bulleted below:

• summaries: Tuesday maintenance summary, range & duty cycle weekly, IFO maintenance
• 4k and 2k ISS coupling into DARM was measured
• 4k POB I/Q coherence with AS_Q was reduced by resetting the phase of PO2, yielding brief stretches of 14Mpc running
• H1 received a new timing system
• an RF study was performed on H2
• the 2k FMY optical lever laser was swapped out
• CDS Tuesday maintenance was summarized here

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

  Power outage prevented report from being filed in a timely manner.

Mechanical and Optical Systems (Coyne)

See Advanced LIGO

Controls and Data Systems (Bork)

See Advanced LIGO

40-Meter Interferometer (Weinstein)

• DC detection:
  • Ben and Rich brought over their PZT drivers and the QPD whitening electronics (with documentation!), and installed them in the DC readout controls rack (1X5).
  • Ben and Bob ran conduit to power up the DC readout control rack, including HV for the PZT drivers. Everything is now powered up and, to lowest order, working.
  • Rob used the new system to put DC bias on the tip-tilt PZTs and they seem to work. He's beginning to test the OMC PZT controls.
  • We will place two QPDs on the AS table to monitor the OMC reflected beam exiting the chamber.
  • Alex worked some more on getting dtt/dataviewer running with our new 32 kHz system.
  • Steve reports that the Krypton peak from the leaky DC photodetector nipple is going down; so the leak is bigger than we estimated.
• Vacuum squeezing:
  • Go has designed a new propeller-type mirror mount that can be rotated by the picomotor. Parts are bring machined in the shop and a new picomotor has been ordered.
  • Go measured the OPO mode structure in both polarizations. The OPO output beam is very elliptical; Go is designing a new mode-matching solution including a cylindrical lens.
  • Go and Osamu are setting up setting up subcarrier generation optics to lock the OPO to a frequency shifted subcarrier.
  • Go and Osamu are installing Riccardo's photodiode and beginning tests.
  • Kirk and Go installed some of the squeezed vacuum injection optics.
• IFO commissioning, Electronics, controls, computers:
  • Sam and Kirk are preparing to replace our old CM board with a new style board at the LSC rack. They are in the process of setting up all the connections and defining the cross-connect work, and readying all the EPICS database files. They will make sure the LSC rack drawings get updated.
  • After Kirk replaced the mounts of the EOMs in the Mach Zehnder last week with more stable ones, we expected the MZ transmitted beam to get more stable. But the weather started changing at around the same time, and the laser power started to slowly vary. (Not sure if this is real or due to monitoring photodiodes being strongly humidity-dependent). Steve put a calorimeter in a portion of the PSL beam to monitor it. Kirk will keep a close eye on the MZ error signal and transmitted power.
  • Sam and Kirk measured the mode cleaner length, and found it to be 1.4 mm longer than the last measurement (2.5 months ago). They have adjusted the RF feequencies accordingly.
  • Rob got the TDS suite of software tools, including ezlockin, to work with the new install of GDS (on Solaris), and after much effort, also on our linux controls computers. He cleaned up much of the controls software, but there is still much work to be done to make all controls computers useful for all tasks.
  • Royal added whitening filters to a Pentek Generic Interface board, and installed it at the ETMY optical lever.
• IFO modeling:
  • Osamu is making much progress in the modeling of AdLIGO length control using OpTickle. He has added radiation pressure to the simulation, and has generated quantum noise curves. He is exploring the 9/45 MHz RF modulation scheme as well as the nominal 9/180 MHz scheme. He will present results at an upcoming AdLIGO meeting.

Thermal Noise Interferometer (Black)

Alignment of SAC is still in progress. NAC is showing a visibility of 75%, better than we had before Matt corrected the mode matching, but not as good as it could be. SAC is only showing dim, high-order modes. Akira is usually the fastest in the group at alignment, and he is working on improving the visibilities.

LASTI (Ottaway)

  No report received

CIT Science Group (Weinstein)

Kent Blackburn [kent@ligo.caltech.edu]
OSG INTEGRATION TESTBED

Yum updated LIGO-CIT-ITB and Tclproxy including kernel
2.6.17-1.2142_FC4

OSG DEVELOPMENT

Provided Michael Samidi with bug reports on LIGO workflow
planner including inability to support multiple document
interface with partitioned dax and inability to abort a
running partitioned workflow.

Installed DASWG OSG-LIGO web page documenting recent and
on-going LIGO OSG development activities in projects section
of DASWG web site.

Planned activities with Pegasus development team related to
next phase of OSG extensions development including data
management design pattern needed by the Pegasus Planner for
SRM and Worker Nodes, and engineering analysis requirements
for HIPE.

Still testing the planner using full-blown HIPE with 24
arbitrary partitions and the cleanup of intermediate GWF
files. For this purpose, I've limited the testing at PSU
and UCSD in the past few days. They're not completed yet.

Have discovered several issues with the planner after
adding support of N arbitrary partitions and the cleanup
of GWF files.
a. logfile monitoring in the status screen is reporting
incorrect information Condor dagman log file when
running multiple workflows.
b. transfer progress bar doesn't report properly with
24 partitions.

Attended weekly DASWG, ITB, VDS and VDT telecoms.

TCLGLOBUS

I've tagged TclGlobus repository with 1.3.86. This release
is to verify the following issues have been resolved in
the cvs respository code base:
a. gridmap file support within LDAS for client authorization
b. debugging support to keep track the number of outstanding
sockets related to LDAS managerAPI core dump
If we don't have any more issues with 1.3.86, we will release
TclGlobus 1.4.0.

NSF REVIEW

Presented to NSF reviews on LIGO cybersecurity and LIGO/LSC
usage of the Open Science Grid during the past year.

OSG RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

Submitted two additional Statements of Work to the OSG Executive
Board for review and approval before submission to the Contracts
office at Madison.
-----

____________________
Rejean Dupuis [rejean@caltech.edu]

- Prepared and gave presentation at the GEO Meeting.
- Working on code to marginalize over frequency and spindown in TDS
for S5 Crab analysis.
- Collaborated with M Pitkin and G Woan on TDS in Glasgow.
- Reviewed TDS S3/S4 known pulsar paper.
- Continued to work with G Mendell to produce spectrograms (e.g. see
new link at www.ligo.caltech.edu/~rejean/S5/spectrograms).
- Acquired new timing info for J0537-6910 from x-ray astronomer.
- Discussed progress of projects with P Patel.

____________________
Eirini Messaritaki [emess@caltech.edu]

* I have been doing the last few runs necessary to wrap up the S5 BBH
search.
* I attended the NSF review of LIGO at LHO.

____________________
Shourov Keith Chatterji [shourov@ligo.caltech.edu]

* Early S5 Q Pipeline trigger production is complete for time
lagged injection studies of Gaussian, sinusoidal Gaussian,
and white noise burst waveform families. Postprocessing of
these triggers to tune the early S5 Q Pipeline search is in
progress.

____________________
Xavier Siemens [siemens@caltech.edu]

- Continued writing S4 string search paper (this is what I'm spending
most of my time on these days)

- Continued investigating segmentation differences in string search
ran one more iteration of the S4 search with a 2s trigger overlap.
Turns out it's not a worry after all.

- At Hanford half of the week for NSF review. Gave a talk there on
pulsar searches.

____________________
stephen fairhurst [fairhurst_s@ligo.caltech.edu]

* Continue work on inspiral hardware injection analysis. Web page at
http://www.lsc-group.phys.uwm.edu/iulgroup/projects/s5/sim/scripts/
hardware_inj.html

* Writing papers on the inspiral pipeline and the upper limit procedure.

* Produce the final upper limit results for S3 BNS.

* Work with Richard O'Shaugnessy to improve documuentation of inspiral
pipeline, and get it running on calibrated h(t) data.

Laboratory Computing (Anderson)

  -----------------------------
LDAS Software Systems (Maros)
-----------------------------

After building and installing LDAS on Solaris Opteron, a problem has
been identified. Unlike all of the other systems, a C application (Tcl)
cannot load a C++ shared object that throws an exception as it will
result in a core dump. A small test has been created which demonstrates
the problem and will be submitted to the GCC team. To try and get
around this issue, the Sun Studio compiler suite is being used.

The managerAPI now supports grid map files. This is enabled or disabled
by the setting of the resource variable ::GRIDMAP_ENABLED.

An issue with the frameCPP RPM has been found this week and is actively
being fixed.

System testing of LDAS was done using version 1.8.345. All tests pass
when using the Tcl socket interface. This does include the lsync tests
that has been enhanced to catch several system signals to force the
dumping of the cache file before exiting. When using tclglobus sockets,
all tests do pass except for the All User command. In the instance of
the All User test from the cmonClient interface, all the tests are run
and all but the last test returns their status. There appears to be an
issue with flushing the results of the last test.

The box linux Opteron (FC4 on 64bit Opteron) has been configured to start
running jobs.

-------------------------------------
LDAS System Administration (Anderson)
-------------------------------------

Caltech
-------
(Dan Kozak)
* Compiled list of /scratch contents for future reference (if it has to
be rebuilt).
* Determined that archiver -f no longer works at CIT.
* Did a lot of work wrt LLO tape labelling (tapes had been imported into
the L700 silo w/o making note of their barcodes).
* Talked to user sung about cluster home directory disk space usage at CIT.
* Spent some time chasing the source of the high load (30+) on
dataserver-cit. Think it's caused by something Keith Thorne is doing,
but nothing definitive yet.
* Helped John Whelan get globus-url-copy working.
* Tested QFS writer/reader mode in version 4.5.27 and with a 4.5.10 writer.
* Sent Duncan email about accessing data on the shelf at LHO (summary:
run at CIT).
* Updated my grid cert.
* Pulled together some storage stats for the NFS review.
* Discovered that LLO has more L700 slots than LHO.
* Eject tapes for shelf storage at LLO.

(Phil Ehrens)
* Finished first working version of the Visitor Application
CGI webform and waiting for feedback from testers.
* Worked with Veronica Kondrashov to implement additional
functionality in the Travel Application Request CGI
webform to support increased flexibility in email delivery.
* Installed CVS in a configuration supporting pserver based authentication
via cvs passwd file, local cvs interaction via group permission, and remote
ssh based interaction via group permission and unix login ability.

(Erik Espinoza)
* Configured email from inside cluster @ Hanford.
* Worked with Ben to fix kickstart @ Hanford.
* Ran tests using different NFS parameters.
* Installed condor_startd w/ debugging info at LDAS-CIT.
* Worked with Phil to do further checking on pidslayer.
* Started setting up E@H configuration at LDAS-MIT.
* RMA'd 5 Hard Disks to ASA Computers.
* Got quote for 2 power supplies for 1u servers from ASA.
* Opened condor-support ticket #1694 for FRGN_KILL issue.
* Opened kernel bugzilla entry #7410 for kernel.

(Stuart Anderson)
* Scheduling QFS and Sol10 patches on production systems.
* Tracking down remaining Condor/VDT issues after the last upgrade at CIT.
* Tracking down abusive NFS cluster jobs at CIT.

MIT
---
(Fred Donovan)
* Made sure user home directories exists in /usr1 on all nodes, ldas-grid, etc.
* Fixed node 40, completed /usr1 checks.
* Rebuilding node 6 (raid 1 failure) and recovered /usr1 data (raid 0 ok).
* Started rebuilding node 12 (same problem as node 6).

Hanford
-------
(Greg Mendell)
* The main sys admin work for me for the past week has been to make sure
that the generation and transfer of RDS, h(t), and SFT data continues to
run smoothly amidst recent power failures and hardware problems. I have
sent Keith Riles a list of segments covering the small number of times
during the run when such problems have left gaps in the data.

(Ben Johnson)
* Added libnsl and SAM/QFS patch to dataserver and gateway, and added
QFS patch to fb1; all during Tuesday maintenance.
* With Erik's assistance, got the kickstart server working properly
again. I was able to repair and kickstart seven nodes so far this week.
* Finalizing list of mail aliases. If all goes well, I should be able
to put them in place today.
* Discovered ~17000 of bad frames on the node hard drives. They have
been removed. Some of the nodes had bad HDDs. I am working on replacing
their HDDs.

---------------------------
General Computing (Wallace)
---------------------------

MIT:
(Fred)
-Ligo problem automount from emvogil-2 I've made this a hard mount
( I meant emvogil-2, not tubera!)
-PS had about 10-12 procmail processes running
-Built New windows machine for F, from unused rackmount
-More backup work tingagel
-Quote research laptop/server for new person (F)
-Set up a couple of printers
-Fixed scsi drive for KM, put XP machine on backups

Hanford:
(Christine)
- Supported the NSF Review.
- Worked with Larry to test the Orinoco AP 4000. Did some research on
other similar wireless APs.
- Discovered that my tape backup system has scsi problems. I still have
my old tape backup system, over the weekend I'll put the old one back
while I try to repair the newer one.
- Talked with Larry about file system naming conventions and trying to
make the sites consistent.

CIT:
(Mike)
-Worked over in 40 meter re-configuring a network printer that is used
on the 114 subnet & Martian network. Replaced a bad network switch plus
ran critical updates on many PC’s.
-Testing the FDA client software for users to login to the new DCC
database. I am also working on putting together some step-by-step
instructions for users to install and login into the new DCC database.
-Backed up Jay Marx’s laptop using Carbon Copy Cloner. I also backup his
user profile to the network as an additional backup.
-Worked a lot on the mail server’s: Problems with the clamd service.
Took care of many Spam Filter issues this week while Larry & Christian
are away on travel.
-Updated all NTSRV’s with the latest critical updates. I also compacted
the DCC database on Antares.
-Configured manual backups on LLPDMWORKS server & ALCOR.
-Found some backup software the will stop/start the service for the
Vault to do a backup. I have been testing many packages on this server
without any luck, but today it looks like I found some software that
will do the trick. I will start my testing ASAP.
-Worked on the FileHold servers most of this week: On my end I have
locked these servers down to only run necessary services/processes in
order to run the web plus SQL server. FileHold engineers are working on
performance issues on the web services. For now the FDA client software
that runs only on windows OS is running correctly.
-Other misc. user support and many additional Sysadmin tasks that I took
care of.

(Bruce Sears)
-iLog Maintenance: (0.5 days)
General iLog maintenance (user adds, keyword adds, systems work, etc.)

(Larry)
-Assisted Christine and others with logistical items of the NSF review.
Things went well and we learned a few new things about the different
setups of the wireless system and using the Macintosh for all
presentations. The parallels s/w worked well with a couple of exceptions.
-Resolved a couple of procurement issues and renewed the licenses for
another software program.
-Worked remotely on the mail services. The machines just don't have the
resources needed to handle all of the logs and other items that are
generated with all the new spam being sent.
-Worked/working some logistical issues in getting a disk system moved
over to LDAS.

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