Weekly Report for Week Ending December 14, 2006

LSC	Administration	Hanford Observatory	Livingston Observatory
Optical & Mechanical	Controls and Data Systems	40 Meter Facility	TNI
LASTI	CIT Science Group	Laboratory Computing	Adv. LIGO Development

Past Weekly Reports

The LIGO Executive Committee Agenda for Monday, December 18, 2006 will be:

(Meeting time: 10:30 am Pacific Time)

1. Announcements

2. Programmatic (Marx)

Monthly Financial Reports

3. Comments on weekly report

4. LSC and Data Analysis (Saulson)

5. LIGO Lab Operations

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

6. Enhancements (Zucker)

7. Advanced LIGO (Shoemaker)

8. Change Control Board/Technical Review Board Session as needed

No open change requests

Site and other business issues:

Special Items:

Special Announcements:

Weekly Report Highlights

LSC Issues and Data Analysis (Saulson)

We were very happy to learn that, at their meetings last week, the Virgo Steering Committee and the EGO Council approved the draft MOU for collaboration with LIGO and the LSC. The agreement will be brought to the LSC Council for an approval vote at a special telephone meeting on 11 Jan 2007 at 0800 Pacific.

LIGO Laboratory Administration (Lindquist)

STATUS OF LSC MOUs (Lloyd)

Working on processing the remaining unsigned MOUs from the August review.

PROPERTY MANAGEMENT (Luna)

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

Continued Working with Property Services to reconcile twenty-two Fabrication Accounts from 2003 to 2006.
Requested information from LLO and LHO to account for eleven pieces of equipment that were not recorded last year due to Oracle problems.
Assisted R. DeSalvo with the receipt of one Network Analyzer shipped from Italy.
Created and submitted Asset Retirement forms for two computers at CIT.

DOCUMENT CONTROL CENTER (Turner, Mak)

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

## pel/al ## We have stopped work on the FileHold Document Management System.
We are developing an alterntive plan to proceed.

FINANCIAL SYSTEMS (Funaro, Brambila, Kaufman)

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

For ACCOUNTS PAYABLE HISTORY Press Here.

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

Submitted Release of Claims to close out Alliance Spacesystems, and then cancelled the Release.
Resolved discrepancy on University of Florida and notified parties.
Working on the change order to Superior Steel. Waiting for the Debarment Certificate.
Working on the change order to Triad.
MIT change order was returned from routing and distributed.
Working on complying with pre-audit findings and preparing for upcoming CPSR audit.

>From: Florence Kaufman <fkaufman>

Completed and sent out various monthly reports for November.
Prepared two Intra Award Cost Transfers.
Prepared and sent out invoice for items shipped to Germany.
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>

The Request for Proposal for the Advanced LIGO Pathfinder Optics Polishing has been received by all of the companies. One has indicated that they will submit a proposal, one has indicated a "no bid," and one has requested a teleconference to ask some questions. That teleconference will be held on December 21.

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

A teleconference was held on Wednesday, December 13, with Matt Brewer, Caltech's Director of Business & Accounting Services, Jay Marx, Joe Giame, and Ed Jasnow for the purpose of discussing the possible formation of a 501(c)(3) corporation for the purpose of raising private funds to support the outreach activities of the new Science Education Center at LLO. Matt went through the requirements of establishing such a corporation, including formation of a Board of Directors, filing papers both with the State of Louisiana and the IRS, keeping financial records, meetings of minutes, filing tax returns, etc. It was agreed that this method would probably be the best to raise funds and get the most significant amount of local involvement. The next step is for Matt to do some more research and Ed to get our lawyer, David Flores, involved and re-connected with the lawyer in Baton Rouge, John McDermott, who had been involved previously.
Also discussed in this teleconference was the organization of the bookstore/gift shop operating in the Science Education Center. The NSF has already determined that income from this store is deemed "program income," which will go back into the operation of the store. Matt stated that an auxiliary account in Oracle would be set up to record expenses and income, a bank account would be opened at a local bank in Livingston, and procedures for such an operation would be sent down. The target date for the full formal operation is January 22, 2007.
The model that Alliance Spacesystems, Inc., (ASI) supplied and the as-built prototype at MIT do not agree, slowing down a shim rework decision. The model is complicated enough that the most cost/schedule productive solution to consult ASI on the rework. ASI has been requested to quote two separate weeks of consulting time for their engineer to work with MIT to solve the problem.

PROPOSALS and REPORTS (Lindquist)

We submitted the monthly report for the end of November to the NSF.

CHANGE CONTROL/CONTINGENCY MANAGEMENT (Lindquist)

There are no open change requests.

HUMAN RESOURCES (Akutagawa)

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

There was a meeting of the LIGO Staffing Committee on Monday, December 11.

The minutes and action items have been posted on the SC web page

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)

Rain, high winds and high microseism impacted duty cycles (H1 73%, H2 74%) and ranges (H1 9-13Mpc, H2 5.5-7Mpc) this week. Early Friday winds topped out at 109mph, replenishing the stockpile of tumbleweeds clustered against the buildings; more baling is in order. The microseism (as high as 2um/s) was induced by storms in the N. Atlantic, with waveheights of 50'. We may be able to use NOAA data to predict high microseism up to a week in advance, which could be helpful in scheduling commissioning and maintenance activity.

Some S5 highlights from the LHO elog are bulleted below:

summaries: Tuesday maintenance and CDS summaries, range & duty cycle weekly, IFO maintenance
late 06 spectograms derived from short-Fourier transform data (SFTs) from both machines were posted
a run on H1 and H2 gathered enough information to close out the V3 calibration for the first calendar year of S5
IRIG-B appears to be responsible for lines seen in magnetometers that may couple into DARMERR and pulsar searches... LVEA radio analyses show increased hash below 100Hz

ISCT4 was found not to be fully floating on Monday as two of four stops were touching, likely due to table deformation. This was corrected Tuesday
we accidentally ran without IRIG-B for a brief period on Tuesday, requiring a dataqual flag to ensure the timing is good before and after the interval

fast channel photodetectors were added to 2k PSL, bringing the configuration in-line with H1
a H2 VCO-based calibration is within 9% of the official calibration, sitting midway between the H2 official calibration and the H2 photocalibrator
ASPD1 shows lines above 1kHz (such as 2048Hz, and many in the 5-6kHz range) that do not appear in other PDs

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

S5 Run (Igor Yakushin)

56% duty cycle, 12-13 Mpc range. During the weekends the microseismic noise was so high that it was impossible to lock the interferometer.

LIGO computing and network security (Roddy)
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Reported under General Computing, see below.

General computing and LDAS admin (Giardina)
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Reported under General Computing, see below

Reported under LDAS System Administration, see below

Data analysis & computing (Yakushin)
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Storage/Condor/LDAS admin:
Reported under LDAS System Administration, see below

Data analysis:

Reported under Data Analysis activities, see below

Advanced LIGO (Janeen Romie)

Preparing for OMC review.
Provided updated SUS schedule to Dwight & Carol, in anticipation of our meeting. Will go over addition of RM and IMC tasks in final design stage. OMC is already being tracked in preliminary design.
Talking with Carol, Mike Z, Dave O, Norna and others about LASTI test plan.
Provided updated thermal compensation plate drawing to Gari & Phil.
Working on getting up to date on earthquake stop testing at LASTI.
Will be a member of the review committee.

Science Education and Outreach (John Thacker)

prepared & delivered two outreach programs to Middle School (MS) groups
prepared one MS program for Friday and one teacher Professional Development program for Saturday.
fine tuned one engineering design activity
developed outreach budget for this year

Mechanical and Optical Systems (Coyne)

See Advanced LIGO

Controls and Data Systems (Bork)

See Advanced LIGO

40-Meter Interferometer (Weinstein)

IFO commissioning, Electronics, controls, computers:
- There was more work on smooth locking of the PRFPMI, by Valera, Rob, Sam, Rana and Kirk.
- There was more work on the common mode servo, by Rana, Sam and Kirk. An offset that was pulling the MC off resonance and out of alignment was found and trimmed away. After that, they were able to lock the YARM using the CM servo board, with an 18 kHz UGF with 30 degrees of phase. Sam also wrote a detailed note on the common mode servo topology.
- Sam, Rana, and Valera set the LSC Output Matrix today to better 'diagonalize' the DRMI. The new settings make it so that driving MICH doesn't change the physical PRC and SRC lengths. Driving the SRC loop also doesn't change the PRC loop. This had a remarkably good influence on the MICH loop, removing an extra unity gain crossing that it had.
- Valera, Rana, and Bram centered the beam spot on the ETMX by minimizing the angle-to-length coupling in the x-arm. They then centered the transmitted beam of the X-arm on to the QPDX.
- Valera, Bram, Rob and Rana have come up with a new alignment system for the 40m making use of dithering of the suspended optics and steering PZTs in pitch and yaw. We decided that the best way to implement this new system was not to modify our existing ASC system (which doesn't do much but also doesn't have much CPU power) but instead to assemble a new PCIX-based system. This will also give us room to grow and implement more control systems, and/or migrate the existing SUS, LSC, etc systems to the new architecture.
- Rolf is starting work on the controls for this new alignment system. This will require a computer, I/O chassis, ADC card and some networking equipment to be purchased. We will use our Matlab to CDS code generation tool for the software, which will require us to add a few more parts to our library. Parts will include a reflective memory comms part to send/rcv signals to/from the existing LSC and ASC computers and a new matrix part which can be sized by the user (presently support up to 8x8, but new system requires much larger, so we'll make that part such that the user can specify any size). We have all the hardware in house (except the network switch), but we will need to purchase replacements. Goal is to have this installed by mid January.
IFO modeling:
- Osamu and Kentaro have developed a new RF modulation scheme for control of AdLIGO, based on lower RF frequencies (4.5 and 58.5 MHz), which met with favor at last week's AdLIGO ISC summit at MIT. Continued development of the scheme and the modelling is in progress.
- Kirk fixed a bug in the way the Bench quantum noise model handled losses, and updated the predictions for the 40m quantum noise curve.
DC detection:
- Ben is doing a quick re-design of the DCPD head electronics to allow for internal ribbon cables to minimize harming the pin seals, and to install another stage of whitening. We'll install this in a new nipple and vent sometime soon to swap out the old and swap in this new DCPD electronics.
- The krypton leaking out of the nipple housing the DC photodiode preamp is almost gone. At day 2 after pumpdown, the peak at AMU=84 was at 6e-8Torr partial pressure. Now, after 67 days of pumping with maglev only the partial pressure is 2e-11Torr.
Vacuum squeezing:
- Go installed a Lightwave 126 laser from MIT to use in creating a frequency-shifted subcarrier. He and Osamu spent some time tuning the temperature control of both this laser and our main MOPA, to find the beat between them. With advice from Thomas at MIT, they finally found the beat. Go then realigned and mode-matched the new 126 subcarrier to the OPO cavity in the TEM00 modes which are orthogonally polarized to the seed field. With the 126's sufficient laser power, he can lock the cavity stably now. He then phase-locked the second laser to the MOPA laser with its fast actuator.
- Go has now readied almost everything in his squeezer on the PSL table and further progress requires light to/from the main interferometer. We will need to vent soon to install his improved flipper mirror which can be flipped into place to route the asymmetric port beam to the squeezer as opposed to the DC readout system. He and Osamu will develop a detailed plan for locking the interferometer in a desired configuration (simplest would be a signal-recylced Michelson) where they are shot-noise limited above ~ 30 kHz, and take a series of measurements with the injected squeezed vacuum.
Lab Infrastructure, Bake lab:
- Bob has been working with visitors on the assembly of magnets for a new AdLIGO Faraday isolator. He will bake the completed assembly over the weekend.

Thermal Noise Interferometer (Black)

Nothing significant to report this week.

LASTI (Ottaway)

No report received.

CIT Science Group (Weinstein)

________________

Patrick Sutton

For the xpipeline coherent analysis package, I've written several helper functions for simulating GWBs and processing results files. I've run and studied more simulations with the H1-H2-L1-V1 and H1-G1-L1-V1 networks.
LSC-PP duties: Reviewed several GWDAW talks and posters, including those by Kalmus, Ajith, Hewitson, Hild.
Researching data exchange software for the LIGO-Virgo project IIb joint bursts analysis (24 hours real data).
Met with Helgason to show him how to set up and submit qpipeline jobs on the CIT cluster.
Talked with Anderson about track search.

________________

Eirini Messaritaki

during the past week I have been looking at the S5a BBH loudest candidate events, investigating their correlations with environmental channels and their physical parameters.

________________

Rejean Dupuis

prepared several reference letters for previous student
generated spectrograms for last month of science data (www.ligo.caltech.edu/S5/spectrograms)

________________

Gregory Mendell

A technical document, "Parameter Estimation Using Short Fourier Transforms" describing work I have done with Karl Wette of The Australian National University on SFT parameter estimation and powerflux
Generalizations has been sent to the DCC with the number LIGO-T060286-00-Z. A link to the document is also on the pulgroup investigations page: http://www.lsc-group.phys.uwm.edu/cgi-bin/enote.pl? nb=puls5general&action=vi ew&page=5
We hope to further investigate the methods described in the document over the next year.

________________

Igor Yakushin

Working on the online infrastructure for the coherent waveburst analysis.

________________

Kent Blackburn

TCLGLOBUS:

Still working with Mary Lei on the LDAS buffering problem. I have verified the actual number of bytes Globus XIO sends and receives from the log. There are no mismatched bytes.

OSG DEVELOPMENT:

Debugged Gratia Accounting Probe with FNAL Developer P. Canal
Installed VDT 1.5.2 on Validation Test Bed
Debugged OSG client with Alain Roy
Chaired ITB weekly meeting.
Met with OSG-Extensions Manager on progress and issues.
Met with OSG ITB Manager on progress and issues.
Moved ITB and VTB hardware to new position on machine room floor.

OSG APPLICATIONS:

Running nano HIPE with local cache at UWMilwaukee has not been successful because we can't get the data staged out from UWMilwaukee gatekeeper to my submit host (osg-itb-se.ligo.caltech.edu). This problem might only show up at UWMilwaukee because I don't see this problem when running nano HIPE at CIT ITB cluster.
Will run nano HIPE with local cache at Fermilab once the cluster becomes available. Currently, it's down.
Completed running full HIPE with 24 partitions (no clustering) at Fermilab. It took almost one month to complete this experiment since we're only getting 25 max VO slots.
Completed clustering study with 12 partitions with the clustered factor is set to 50, 75, 100 and 500 at PSU. I still need to complete 25, 1000 and no clustering.

OSG MANAGEMENT

Hosted the three days of OSG Finance Board meeting, OSG Executive Board Meeting and OSG Blueprint Meeting.
Continued work on Statements of Work for OSG

Laboratory Computing (Anderson)

-----------------------------

LDAS Software Systems (Maros)

-----------------------------

The ability to set soft limits for several system resources has been added (PR#3002). Both the frameAPI (Solaris) and datacondAPI (Linux) were tested with values that limited the amount of virtual memory each of these process could allocate. When the processes tried to allocate memory in excess of the soft limit, the job was aborted with a proper exception of "bad alloc".

Low level read and write errors in the frameCPP library are now being properly reported (PR#2647). This was verified using /ldas/bin/FrVerify on /archive/frames/E4/L0/LHO/H-R-67362/H-R-673629185-1.gwf. The program properly reported back the message 'FILE_OPEN_ERROR: Low level read error: No such device'.

Work has started on reporting back the sample rate information for the getChannels user command (PR#2152). All unit testing has passed and it now just has to pass the system testing.

Use of gcore by the managerAPI upon an API's shutdown is now controlled by a resource variable. Also, the resource ::MAX_API_SOCKET_TIMEOUT_SECS has been added. The value of the parameter specifies the number of seconds to wait for the complete text of a command before declaring a command malformed. This parameter has been used on ldas-test. The result was the elimination of all errors related to malformed commands.

The system testing of LDAS was done using versions 1.8.390 and 1.8.394. In both cases, all tests successfully completed except for the "All User Cmds" test.

The dmt test that sometimes failed because of foreign key problems has been fixed by submitting to SeqInsert via preset order instead of counting on TCL's 'lsort [ glob *xml]' command.

The failures with the "All User Cmd" has been fixed by replacing the variable ${::DB} with ldas_tst.

-------------------------------------

LDAS System Administration (Anderson)

-------------------------------------

Caltech

(Dan Kozak)

Finished prepping for the arrival of the 6140 RAID arrays.
(With Phil) carted new equipment from Synchotron to Bridge and Millikan.
Put FC HBAs, DVD drives and hard disks in two of the new X2200s.
Asked Disk-O-Tpae about 9940 tape warranty returns. Turns out that they used to deal with this, but now Imation wants to handle it directly. Mark (Disk-O-Tape) gave be a pointer to a web page to begin this process.
Heled clean up after the T3 outage at LLO. In particular remember that if you can't mount a filesystem because there's a non-existent sub-directory of it NFS exported, you can move the mount point to a new name, create a new mount point, mount the filesystem and get on with your life.
Finished verifying that all the data that had been lost at LHO due to 2 dropped tapes had made it from CIT back to LHO.
Set up the RAID set and configuration parameters for Larry's new 3511.
Hassled user sung about a single 36GB file.
Verified that Igor's copying of Burst MDC data back to /archive was
making it to tape.

(Phil Ehrens)

Finished debugging and deployed certcheck.sh on a number of machines at CIT, LHO, LLO, and MIT. Began agressively cleaning up expired certs.
Installed Solaris 10 update 3 on ldas-suntest3 and ldas-sundev1.
Updated LDAS managerAPI log management code in genericAPI log.tcl
module to make use of tcl-8.4 support for creating links. Replaced a log file copy with acopy with a rename and relink procedure.

(Erik Espinoza)

Worked with Larry on gacrux (replacement GC server).
Tested Condor pre-release 6.8.3 on frog.
Built PostgreSQL 6.2.0 rpm's on frog.
Trained scutulum (spam filter) to better detect spam.
Worked with condor-support to resolve "Quill db growing out of control" issue.
Investigated Sol 10u3 sendmail config.
Tested dagman/Vanilla issue on frog.
Rebuilt Quill db's for LLO, LHO, CIT, MIT.
Lowered Condor Obituary log from 200 back to the default of 20.
Lowered Debug level on Startd.

(Stuart Anderson)

Received the first half of the large order for new disk storage and servers to replace the old T3's and V880 dataserver machines.
Helping to track down a few Condor related issues.
Helped to start testing the latest Solaris 10 Update 3 release.

MIT

(Junwei Cao)

Removing RDS_R_L1 data on pcraids so that new L3 and HT data can be copied from CIT to MIT. These include pcraid3 and pcraid11.

(Fred Donovan)

All quiet. Two sets of breakers keeps tripping - although room temp is ok
Met with Junwei, went over LDR infrastructure, scheduler ldrdatafind etc.

Livingston

(Igor Yakushin)

After T3-12 failure, samfsck was run on /archive.
Segment database replication between sites was broken due to the lost message from LLO to LHO; segment database is down at all the sites at the moment.

(Dwayne Giardina)

Ejected tapes for shipment to CIT, imported and labeled replacements
Additions/modifications to the cluster_mon utility, including ability to change graph ranges.
t3-12 became frozen Monday night. I power-cycled to restore. archive needed samfsck. processes were restarted Wednesday morning, but the Segment database is down now for repair.

Hanford

(Greg Mendell)

I am working to make sure the archiving and transfer of raw, RDS, and trend data is up-to-date after this week's filesystem problems at LLO. I am also preparing to take over management of the LSC Data Grid client/server distribution, and learning more about the pacman distribution environment.

(Ben Johnson)

Went through the necessary steps for travel to the DASWG meeting at Caltech, January 17 and 18.
Put connection limiting code, and [A,B) [A,A] checking code for the LDRdataFindServer (diskcache) into CVS. It should be portable to the ldbdd servers. It is *not* running on any of the production servers.
The stuck "LSCdataFind" phenomenon was further diagnosed to be a Condor problem here. Aiding the developers in the bug squashing effort.
Enhanced the LSCdataFindClient class, to enforce [A,B) [A,A] checks client-side. Also fixed the "feature" where the client would connect to the server *before* actually checking the user arguments.
Removed --continue from Disk2Disk_S5 at both sites. It is not very useful for L0 data copying, and could result in missing L0 data when filesystems go down/insane.
The two new 3511 JBOD units are running with media scans enabled. So far they are still behaving ok.

---------------------------

General Computing (Wallace)

---------------------------

MIT

(Fred)

Built and installed new sendmail 8.13.6 on ligo
Installed nagios on tintagel, working with minimal configuration
Windows xp install
IBM part returns (batteries, docking station), pursuing delayed laptop order.
Some new computer (LATSI opteron) issues - noisy fans, dented case, all set now. Some orders (matlab, accessories for EK), few more imap clients.

Livingston

(Dwayne)

ran Christian's unattended install on two PCs, one for a user, one for the Adv. LIGO lab.
ordered a part to fix SEC building printer. It just arrived, so I should get it installed this afternoon.
cleanup of area outside my office, installed a KVM to eliminate clutter caused by multiple keyboards, monitors, etc.
spam filter cleanup
other usual user requests and support

LLO mail summary for 7 December - 14 December:

Rejected: 29,204 (77 containing virus)

Accepted: 2,930

Total: 32,134

(Shannon)

Lots of networking this week. Finally got a good pair of fiber isolated to the SEC building. This means I can start looking at permanent switching solutions for the building.
Attended a meeting on LSU campus with the LSU IT folks. Learned a few things. Several staff changes in the IT department there.
Still evaluating long term solutions with the LSU network connection. Budgetary concerns plus feature sets of switches will both weigh in on the decision. We are OK for now but as we start adding more machines to
the new allocation the present configuration will only get worse.
Finally received a *complete* price list from Foundry. This will make product selection and features vs. cost a bit easier to determine.
Did some work on the new backup server. Now that Solaris 10 U3 is released, I will upgrade it before we press it into service. There is some new functionality in U3 as far as ZFS is concerned.
Opened a support case for the spam trap. Turns out an upgrade is required for some requested functionality here. It was decided after discussions that it is worth it to upgrade.
More fine tuning of the IDS systems. Suppressing a few rules to lower the false alarm rate. Have managed to significantly reduce the number of false alarms & document what I've done.
Evaluating some software to install on one of the DMZ machines to aid in intrusion detection.

Hanford

(Christine)

Purchased several new laptops for the Operators.
The Cisco 6504 switch/router has arrived and will be installed during the break between Christmas and New Years.
Continuing to try to build from scratch all the Sun freeware applications that are commonly used. Only 8 out or 13 have built and installed properly. I'm still fighting with the other 5 which have various configure, make and make install errors.
Set up a new Sun Ultra 45 running Solaris 10 for Robert Schofield. The computer is a NIS+ client mounting all the GC and LDAS file systems. Worked with Dave to figure out why DTT isn't working from this computer.
Started reading the configuration manual for the new wireless AP. It supports up to 16 SSID interfaces, each SSID being it's own VLAN and each radio interface supports up to 256 wireless stations. It does NTP time synchronization, QoS support and wireless bridging between other APs.

CIT

(Christian)

Linda Turner- Configured Linda¹s email from pop to imap in thunderbird.
Annie Walden - Upgraded Microsoft Office from 2000 to 2003.
Toner cartridge replacements- 3rdflr W/B and Millikan.
Tested VRVS software with Larry and Mike.
Re-imaged laptops that were returned to the loaner pull this week.
Worked on the Spam Filters with Mike and Larry.
Other misc.: Continued onsite software/phone support.

(Veronica)

LIGO:

Work on the new webpage.
Worked on fixing the old DCC.
Roster database updates.
High-res images for a couple of publishers.
Misc web updates.

LSC:

Updates of the techpapers database. LSC-related mailing lists.

(Mike)

Worked on loading and configuring backup software on NTSRV's. I have configured and backed up 4 of our most critical servers. We will have a total of 10 licenses to setup and install.
Helped Linda Turner on an email issue. Christian worked with this as well. We have switched her over to IMAP. Going this route should resolve most of her problems.
Setup and ran VRVS for Kent Blackburn. There were some major issues using this system: Logging in took anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes. Once logging in to launch the Mbone tools took another 10 to 15 minutes to launch as well. Very time consuming. Once logged in the system the video would time out, then you have to restart the video using the client setup tools located within the VRVS applet. Today this system seems to be running ok, but the video problem is the same. It looks like yesterday there may have been some network issues on campus or the system was over loaded with been some network issues on campus or the system was over loaded with multiple users logged in using the various virtual rooms. Christian & Larry worked with me on this as well. This is not a reliable conference system.
Christian and I installed a raid array system in B/A server.
Worked on DHCP server trying to resolve some issues. I'm still working on this server between everything else that is going on.
Searching for some additional software to backup administrator staff to run incremental backups of their local workstations. I'm looking for non-proprietary backup software. We would like too be able to read and recover files without the use of backup software with the option of using the command line if the repository is on a unix file server or the choice of a windows file system using windows explorer etc.
Other user support and sysadmin tasks.

(Bruce)

General iLog maintenance. (0.5 Days)

(Larry)

Made a few purchases of s/w and h/w for different people. The shipping of the monitor order has been delayed another week. Need to go over licensing. A number of the campus based licenses expire in the next month.
Worked with Mike on getting some equipment installed in the racks in the computer room. Mostly, to get ready for the new SUN equipment that is to be installed.
Worked with Veronica and Cleveland in resolving a search engine problem on the existing DCC system.
Went over some minor security issues with Shannon. He is still working on eliminating the false positives on the reports.
Re-installed the s/w for the new internal mailserver. So far the testing on it looks pretty good and things are looking pretty positive on the external mail server Erik E. has setup. If all goes well we will start migrating over at the end of next week.
Resolved a couple of problems on the DCC webserver. The unit needs to be upgraded/replaced. This should happen in the next month, depending on the installation of the new SUN equipment.
Assisted a number of users with different items. Worked on the VRVS testing with Mike and Christian. Also, tested out the webcam on a wireless connection. It actually was not too bad performance wise.
Worked with Christian and Mike on the Spam filters. We are still blocking over 10K/day.

LDAS System Administration (Anderson)General Computing (Wallace)

Advanced LIGO and Supporting R&D (Shoemaker)

Advanced LIGO Systems

From: Hiroaki Yamamoto hiro@ligo.caltech.edu

Modeling and Simulation (Hiro Yamamoto)

e2e weekly meeting

-------------------------------------

Keiko gave a talk about a formulation to accelerate the calculation of the field evolution in a cavity.

COC support (Hiro)

-------------------------------------

In order to make sure that the designed AR coating is not compromised by the thermal heating, the sensitivity of the AR coating against the change of coating quantity due to the thermal effect is studied.

Fast simulation of Dual Recycled Michelson Cavity (Keiko)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

One of two approximations were validated partially. The mirror tilt angle theta as x axis vs the ratio between 2nd order and 1st order of Taylor expansion as y axis (terms lower than 1st orders are eliminated in approximation) was studied. Comparing these ratios with the simulation results, we found that the simulation results agree with no approximation results about 10% when the ratio is around 0.05. However only several examples were studied, so more validations are necessary.

Modeler - e2e simulation engine (Hiro, Bruce, Melody)

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(Melody, Hiro)

We are working to properly make e2e packages available publicly. The major part is to setup a proper copyright model for it. Gnu GPL will be used.

(Bruce)

Creating a new common base class for e2eFUNC_X and userDefinedPrimitive objects.

Mechanical Simulation for advanced LIGO (Sany and SLU team, Osamu)

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We analyzed the effect of back reaction from the triple suspension to HAM-SAS (the horizontal model) with a realistic ground motion as seismic input. By feeding the translational component normal to the optic (X direction) of a typical ground motion to the base of the seismic isolation model that we made previously, he computed the optic™fs X motion under the following four conditions: (a) triple suspension free hanging with no back reaction considered, (b) triple suspension free hanging with back reaction considered (back reaction via the suspension point associated with pendula™fs motion), (c) triple suspension local-damped with no back reaction considered, and (d) triple suspension local-damped with back reaction considered (the back reaction associated with pendula™fs motion plus the local damping actuation force). The results under (a) and (b), or under (c) and (d) did not show any substantial difference, respectively, indicating that the effect of back reaction is negligible. This result is consistent with our previous analysis in which we used white noise as the seismic noise input, using the same HAM-SAS and triple suspension model. The results have been shared with the HAM-SAS modeling group at CIT. Similar analyses with ground yaw input (for the horizontal model) is under way. Analysis for the vertical model with corresponding ground inputs will also be carried out with a modified HAM-SAS model (the one with the suspension cage included).

With a great help by Osamu Miyakawa, we started to make an e2e model of AdvLIGO Input Mode Cleaner cavity-lock acquisition. This model consists of three input optic mirrors suspended to triple suspensions (the optical parameters such as the reflectivity, curvature are the same as Initial LIGO), and equipped with both the length control (low frequency path) and frequency control (high frequency path) for the cavity-lock servo.

ALFI : e2e front end (Melody, Bruce)

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(Bruce)

Changed the implementation of Alfi ParameterDeclaration object's parsable description to match what is expected in the modeler when reading user defined primitive objects.

(Melody)

Fixing a bug in the TextComment and ColoredBox widgets in Alfi. Inherited nodes were saving the widget information multiple times in the box files resulting to the creation of multiple copies.

Relocation of human resource

-----------------------------------------

Bruce Sears moved up to Bay Area and will keep working for us remotely. He has setup computers and softwares at the new location.

Seismic Isolation

From: Brian Lantz <BLantz@stanford.edu>

Meeting notes from the weekly SEI telecon
Friday, Dec 8, 2:00 pm Eastern, 1:00 pm Central, 11:00 am Pacific time

Announcements
Today is Matt DeGree's last day with us. Bye Matt, have fun flying!
Ken Mason was on the call, will be at home for 2 more weeks. Glad you're feeling better, Ken.

HAM contract status

HPD still looking for FEA analysis of BSC , flat plate venting. Joe G. suggests 2.5 cm as a max distance before a vent channel is requires. BTL will try to get an official seal of approval from Dennis.
Jonas working on spring configurations, sizing, etc

Progress on the BSC

sensors: Ben A visit (bench test station, broken sensors)
L4C preamps seem OK. GS-13s not yet examined
capacitive sensors: Jay H. discoved reason for damaged cap sensors - test point on board was occasionally touching a power line on the back plane. Killed a board discovering this, it will be returned for repair. With one down there are 6 in house, but 2 are just back from ADE, and Rich M. will check how the calibration was done. ADE may have left off one of the cable spans, which changes the scale factor by 6%.

Would still like to get 1 new coarse and 1 fine fine displacement sensor

pods at LLO - clamps/ lockers: Southern is working on the clamps, Brian O is following up with Joe Hansen.
Shayng and Brian O. are looking into the locker reliability.
compliance matrix: The compliance matricies are not converging the way we expect. Rich M will try to measure the blade tip location, the blade shape, and (remeasure) the calibration of the actuators.
Locking of stage 1 during the measurements of stage 2 complience dramatically reduced the stage 1 motion, but didn't make much difference in the compliance measurement. Rich M will contact Ken Smith at ASI to discuss what to do. We'd like to get Ken Smith involved, so as to minimize the time.
flanges: The 20 amp flanges once again cracked at the bake step. Rich is evaluating the current requirement. 20 amp is clearly more than we need, we hope that a smaller capacity will be more reliable, since the size of the metal pins in the ceramic seal are smaller. they will probably be cheaper, too.
cleaning: Ken mason is following up with Dennis about some issues which have arisen with the cleaning bids. This contract issue is still pending, so is not in these notes.

Feedforward at Stanford

Matt's last day.
short document in editing (what we accomplished, where the files are)

seismometry

system taken apart into bits for machining of new features. Expect machining to be done in a ~2 weeks (although break starts then, so it may be January).
Adding: mounts for 4 temp probes and pressure sensor, installing new optical sensors and flags, new optic for interferometric sensor, spacer for euler buckling springs, holder for actuator coil, mount for actuator magnet.

Corner station SPI

measured some open loop noise performance and transfer functions

From: Ben Abbott <abbott_b@ligo.caltech.edu>

Seismic:

HAM-SAS

9 of the 12 boards for the HAM-SAS electronics system were stuffed, tested, put into their boxes, brought to LASTI and installed last week.
While I was doing their installation, Alex and Jay were installing and testing the computer system.
Once The computer was up and running we checked the signal propagation from the module to the computer screen, and back from the computer to the module. Everything seems to be in order, and functioning well.
Valerio and Virginio have been testing the LVDT Driver, and they have determined that it seems to be working fine, and can be installed without any revs.
I am working on the in-vac circuit board, and I'm modifying the system schematics to reflect a small change that I incorporated into the in-vac breakout design.
I'll be travelling back to LASTI to install the remaining electronics, and run field cables.

ISI

The new GS-13 boards have mounting holes that were spaced incorrectly. New boards were ordered today, and should be arriving shortly.

Suspensions

From: Janeen Romie <janeen@ligo-la.caltech.edu>

Advanced LIGO

Preparing for OMC review tomorrow.
Provided updated SUS schedule to Dwight & Carol, in anticipation of our meeting tomorrow. Will go over addition of RM and IMC tasks in final design stage. OMC is already being tracked in preliminary design.
Talking with Carol, Mike Z, Dave O, Norna and others about LASTI test plan.
Provided updated thermal compensation plate drawing to Gari & Phil.
Working on getting up to date on earthquake stop testing at LASTI. Will be a member of the review committee.

From: k mailand kmailand@ligo.caltech.edu

The CES shop is continuing work on the arm style, and LASTI conveyor style, installation tooling.
I have been working with CES on the ESD mask , and with Navitar the coating company re.the tooling requirements for their process.
I'm also doing a preliminary design layout for a suspended cavity beam dump for Mike Smith.

From: Chris Echols <cechols@ligo.caltech.edu>

Core Optics

No Report

Auxiliary Optics

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

SLC

The HAM6 flange motion causes excessive scattered light noise from the Brewster's window mounted at that location and will not meet the SRD minimum strain requirements. The baseline concept will be to keep the Brewster's window during initial commissioning and then remove it to obtain the ultimate strain sensitivity.
Another scattered light source that may be problematic is the cryopump baffle, depending upon the motion of the spool piece to which it is mounted near the cryopump at the ends of the arms.
The SLC Conceptual Design and Requirements document is expected to be completed before the next reporting period.

Pre-Stabilized Laser

From: Peter King <pking@ligo.caltech.edu>

Work continues at LZH on replacing the air-conditioning system. As of time of writing this work is expected to have been completed.
Work is also being done for the heat exchange to building water. A combination of steel and plastic parts are used in piping the water to the laser lab. At present the plan is to test approximately 50 m of travel for the cooling hoses for the functional prototype. In addition the search is on for a good chiller capable of delivering a flow rate of 60 l/min at a pressure of 5 bar.
The cold plate for the amplifier unit is being gold plated at the moment. It should be ready by week's end.

Control and Data Systems

From: Rolf Bork rolf@ligo.caltech.edu

AdvLigo

Suspensions: (Jay)

Installed the coil drivers and sus receiver chassis necessary for control of the HAM SAS triple suspension in the quad rack at LASTI.
System and rack drawings are being updated to incorporate the triple controls into the existing quad controls.
Installation and test will be completed in mid-January.
I have started to learn how to use the optickle tool to develop the requirements for the AdL triples.

ISI:

(Jay) A short between the +15V and the chassis was discovered in one of the capacitive position sensor chassis. This short was caused by the "temporary" installation of the old backplane design into the new chassis. The old backplane was mounted in the new chassis using a clamping scheme and small movements over time caused the short. The new backplane design is made for the new chassis and will not have this problem. This backplane fits on the back rails and is secured by mounting screws. In addition, the test point that shorted to the chassis has been moved.
(Ben) The new GS-13 boards have mounting holes that were spaced incorrectly. New boards were ordered today, and should be arriving shortly.
(Mohana) Hamilton Prototype Metal work has been done for the 2U Coil Driver Chassis. But there are few changes with the packaging on the PCB Board and the connectors to the DAC and the Anti Aliasing chassis. And I am spending some time on it. Hoping to send the PCB Board Tomorrow. I am also designing the interface Board goes with it to the rear panel of the Coil Driver Chassis.

HAM-SAS (Ben)

9 of the 12 boards for the HAM-SAS electronics system were stuffed, tested, put into their boxes, brought to LASTI and installed last week.
Valerio and Virginio have been testing the LVDT Driver, and they have determined that it seems to be working fine, and can be installed without any revs.
I am working on the in-vac circuit board, and I'm modifying the system schematics to reflect a small change that I incorporated into the in-vac breakout design.
I'll be travelling back to LASTI to install the remaining electronics, and run field cables in mid January.

Input Optics

No report

For additional information about this report, contact Albert Lazzarini or Phil Lindquist