Weekly Report for Week Ending January 25, 2007

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

Special Announcements:

Weekly Report Highlights

LSC Issues (Saulson)

LIGO Laboratory Administration (Lindquist)

PROPERTY MANAGEMENT (Luna)

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

• Created Property Records for a Bus Analyzer (L. Bogue @ LLO)
• Tagged and created Property records for four Sun Computers (S. Anderson @ CIT)
• Working in disposing two Caltech-owned pieces of equipment form the Wilson House(R. Abbot)
• Attended Caltech's Fabrications class presented by the Project Accounting Office and Property Services.
• Continued working on LIGO's Equipment Inventory @ CIT.

DOCUMENT CONTROL CENTER (Turner, Mak)

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

(Two Weeks)

• Measured, planned and selected storage racks for the new sub-basement room for archive records and equipment.  The selections were provided to Joanne in PMA and the order is expected to be placed tomorrow with delivery anticipated late next week.  The racks chosen are extra tall to take advantage of the high ceilings given the small footprint of the room itself.
• Handled a document request from the UK group as they prepare a grant proposal for submittal.  They requested a report listing all documents generated by more than 30 authors from three categories -- E, M, and T -- for the years 2002 to the present.  To create this compilation, nearly 300 queries were generated semi-automatically by the current DCC system, and published in Word.  This effort took about 2 1/2 hours to complete.  The request was received and delivered the same day.
• Continued to sift through the boxes and documents housed in the sub-basement in preparation of the anticipated, but still unscheduled, move.  Have sifted through two shelves of rolled drawings, tossing out duplicates and adding to the database those never filed.  Rolled drawings will be placed in drawing tubes, labeled, and stored on a special rack in the new room.  Repacking will begin to put all boxed documents that are currently in different sized boxes into banker boxes that will fit on the new storage racks.  We anticipate approximately 150 packed boxes when finished.
• The order was placed for the new sub-basement storage racks.  They arrived yesterday and will be assembled in the coming days so we can begin to transfer some of the repacked document boxes to their new location.

ISSUES

• The Executive Committee needs to give consideration as to whether we want to continue to keep paper copies of all documents or to get rid of these hard copy documents that are available electronically.  Factors to consider on the electronic side of the issue is security and back-up, corrupted files, and migration/format/readability issues over time.  These factors should be weighed against the labor, material costs, and physical storage needs for paper copies.  We currently have several hundred documents that have been entered into the database.  However, we have deferred the labor intensive process of preparing folders and filing them on the shelves until a decision is made regarding this matter.

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

• Scanning Update - Progress continues on scanning of old Chronological Files.

Document Management System Upgrade (Lindquist)

The Plan B committee met Friday, January 19, 2007.  This was our first meeting.  The committee will assess 1) incremental improvements to our current system and 2) other “best-in-class” systems.  The next meeting is scheduled for Friday, January 26.

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

(Two weeks)

Final delivery was made of all documentation generated over the past 12 years encompassing the design, development, and enhancements of the current DCC system.  This package was provided in both hard copy and electronic versions and includes all source code, technical notes, relational diagrams, forms, tables, and correspondence.  In addition to the current system, the delivery also provided all documentation pertaining to the conversion effort over the past year in preparation of moving from the current document management system to the new FileHold system.  This package includes the conversion database, all queries generated to assign documents to locations during migration, technical notes, and correspondence.  Taken as a complete deliverable, this effort effectively archives the history and evolution of the DCC document system and provides a picture of the system as it exists today.

The hard copy documentation was checked and an overall review of it was made.  Additionally, the first receipt of the electronic version of all the documentation proved to be corrupted and a new memory stick was received.  I went through each of the folders and most of the documents and found no difficulty opening any of them.  There are a few items to finish checking and then multiple DVD copies will be made for use by others as needed.

[This is an important deliverable for the DCC Upgrade Process.  Thank you Linda and George. –pel]

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>

• Modified Mod. 32 to MIT and re-routed for the package for approval.
• Audit files have been returned and filed.
• Attended the fabrication class.
• Working an export order for a piece of equipment.
• Closed out the rental order.
• Responded to inquiries on sales tax orders for the sites.

>From: Florence Kaufman <fkaufman>

• Attended a training session on Fabrication Accounts.
• Prepared an analysis of the difference between what was shown in the MIT system for the Contract Value with LIGO and the amount shown by LIGO.  The unexplained difference was delaying the submittal of the November invoice from MIT.  The reasons for the difference have now been identified and explained, and corrections will be made.
• A subset of the monthly financial report for December showing just the information for Hanford and Livingston has been posted on the network.  Access to this report is password protected.
• 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>

• Gina Salone, Florence Kaufman, Ruth Brambila, and Ed Jasnow worked with Kara DeNutte, of MIT, to resolve a discrepancy between Caltech and MIT regarding the cumulative value of the MIT contract.  A careful review of all the change orders revealed errors on both sides, and resulted in agreement on the new cumulative value.  The errors involved MIT using their proposed amounts instead of the amounts actually received, and Caltech's upgrade from the old IFIS system to Oracle.

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

• Three proposals were received on January 19 for the Pathfinder optical polishing task for Advanced LIGO.  These proposals were distributed to the Evaluation Committee, which will meet to discuss its findings and recommendations to the Source Selection Official (SSO), Jay Marx.

PROPOSALS and REPORTS (Lindquist)

Upcoming events include:

• Proposal for Continuing Operations (2009-2013) due to the NSF this summer.  We will meet with the NSF for discussions mid-February.
• A total business systems review (TBSR) has been scheduled at Caltech the end of February.  The NSF team will also visit the sites.

CHANGE CONTROL/CONTINGENCY MANAGEMENT (Lindquist)

• We will begin to discuss the HAM-SAS CR070001.

HUMAN RESOURCES (Akutagawa)

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

• A Staffing Committee meeting was held on January 22, and the minutes and action items from that meeting are in progress and when completed will be posted on the SC private web page.

• The next Staffing Committee meeting is scheduled for February 26.

Quality/Safety (Tyler)

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

Safety audits of Caltech campus labs continue.  The Audit Team has been impressed with how LIGO personnel have successfully "created" safe and productive work areas, especially considering current space and funding limitations.  Laser safety continues to one of the primary safety issues evaluated during the audits.  The requirement to maintain "good-housekeeping" is also addressed.  The campus audits are expected to be completed in February.

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

Summary of S5 Activities at LIGO Hanford Observatory (compiled by K. Kawabe)

Over the weekend, both of the IFOs ran nicely with the mean duty cycle of over 90%.

On Monday Jan 22, we started one-week commissioning period as planned.

Range and Duty Cycle update is here.

List of commissioning activities (mostly from this wiki page with some link to elog):

• H1 DARM to PZT feedback (aka microseism servo).
• Line Finding activities.
• H2 radiation pressure effect measurement.
• Noise Budget update (e.g. WFS, REFL shot noise, Oscillator phase noise).
• Calibration related measurements e.g. coil cal, photon cal, VCO cal.
• High Freq. Channel Checks (Fast AS_Q)
• H1 full power operation.
• Strain Readback for IOO PZT.
• ETMs Drum Head mode investigations.
• Change of TCS temperature settings.
• Roofing.

LHO Outreach:

Outreach has posted summaries of a number of 2006 LHO events on our event highlights page. Most articles dated later than 3/2006 are new.

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

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)
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Storage/Condor/LDAS admin:
Reported under LDAS System Administration, see below

Data analysis:
Reported under Data Analysis activities, see below

Mechanical and Optical Systems (Coyne)

See Advanced LIGO

Controls and Data Systems (Bork)

- Recieved report from LLO that hourly automatic backup of EPICS
channels appeared to cause some noise in the IFO. We are not sure what
the mechanism is that would cause this, but testing continues. There was
a rumor that the realtime frontend CPU times went up whenever this
backup occurs, but Dave and Vern looked through the data and there does
not seem to be a correlation there. While testing continues, we have
come up with a few ways to try and keep the network traffic down during
backups.
- Modified LLO suspension controller software per Rana's request.
Change puts downsampling filters in all suspension LSC signals being
sent to HEPI for tidal corrections.

See also Advanced LIGO

40-Meter Interferometer (Weinstein)

January 24th, just 4pm, a new boy 'Yonosuke' was born at Verdugo Hospital in Glendale. Yonosuke means a child of the sun. Osamu and Hanako named him with a wish that he will be a bright and fair boy like California's sun. Baby's weight was 7.14lb, and both mother and baby are very fine.

IFO commissioning, Electronics, controls, computers:

• Tobin, Rob, and Kirk got back to smooth PRFPMI locking. Kirk did some modelling and came up with good signals for handoffs to smoothly go to the desired final configuration. They are implementing these on the 40m. They found and fixed some problems with demod phases. They got through the locking script and are ready to hand off to the SPOB166 signal, which requires a new SPOB166 photodiode. Work in progress.
• Kirk measured the lengths of the two arm cavities by driving them through multiple fringes and observing the relative positions of the RF sideband peaks in the AS demod signals. The measurement suffers from an ambiguity as to which signal goes with the upper or lower sideband, and it's only really accurate to ~ 1 cm. But it's an interesting measurement, nonetheless. In the process, he observed a rather large 'length to angle' coupling in the YARM, which can be corrected.
• Rob noticed that the conlog is recording data at rates exceeding 10MB per hour. We'll need to address this issue soon.
• Steve and Osamu replaced the PRM oplev laser, and redid the layout of the table in preparation for putting in a HeNe laser.
• Rob is cleaning up the multiple versions of front end code in the /cvs/cds code repository.
• Larry brought us over a new op540m and swapped around some hard drives. op540m is now dual head and doesn't have a buggy OS.

IFO modeling:

DC detection:

• Rob did a mode scan of the OMC transmitted beam by driving the length PZT with a triangle wave. He identified the modes visually on the CCD camera by deliberately misaligning the input beam. With the input beam aligned, The tallest peak in the spectrum is the TEM(m+n=2), which he thinks is due primarily to mode mismatch. Its height is 4% of the carrier maximum. He will tweak the output MMT.

Vacuum squeezing:

• Go measured the noise floor of the DC PD which is for squeezing-enhanced 40m measurements. He then Go estimated the shot noise level for various carrier power levels, assuming that the RF sidebands exiting the AS port when the SRMI is locked is a small fraction of the carrier. He figures that they could be shot-noise limited with 20-40 uW of carrier power.
• Go and Osamu needed finer control of the picomotor that drives the in-vac squeezer pickoff mirror, which we normally control with a joystick. They set up some computer control to send commands to rotate the picomotor with the user-specified number of pulses.

Lab Infrastructure, Bake lab:

• Steve is studying the snow powder in Utah next week.

Thermal Noise Interferometer (Black)

LASTI (Ottaway)

CIT Science Group (Weinstein)

  _________________________

Patrick Sutton [psutton@ligo.caltech.edu]

Scimon shifts:

• I was on scimon shift at LHO from Jan 16-21.  I spent most of my  free time following up glitches in the IFOs, with particular emphasis  on TCS glitches in H1.

Coherent analysis:

• I'm start coding the pipeline/driver scripts to run the xpipeline  analysis for triggered (GRB) searches.

Extra telecons:

• LIGO-GEO telecon to discuss the final coherent waveburst LIGO-GEO  S4 results and discuss the methods paper.
• LSC-PP telecon, mostly devoted to our proposed new review procedures for abstracts and talks.

Laboratory Computing (Anderson)

LDAS Software (Maros)

• Testing of the code for detecting hung NFS mounts (PR#3015) has shown memory issues. This is being investigated and a solution is expected to be forth coming.
• C++ code has been added to the datacondAPI to allow the detection of missing symbols before execution of the algorithm. The TCL integration continues and should soon be completed. Once completed, the datacondAPI will be able to defer execution of a job in the datacondAPI to allow for the arrival of "late" data (PR#3017).
• Work continues on multiple line variables within resource files. The work being done includes both the displaying and editing of such resources (PR#3098).
• A report of excessive overlap warnings from the diskcacheAPI (PR#3115) has been tracked down to extra files in the system test directory. The diskcacheAPI was accurately describing the problem.
• The TCL modifications for supporting new values for the -metadata option of the getChannels command (PR#2152) also near completion. The values of 0 and 1 have been preserved for backwards compatibility. These changes have been added to the user documentation.
• System testing was done using version 1.8.437 of LDAS. Several of the regression tests failed due to changes for PR#2152 originally not supporting 0 and 1 for backwards compatibility. Testing of lsync also failed due to missing symbols. This has been corrected with the addition of a new library (libStat.la). The running of the "All User Command" test quietly ignored the failures in the getChannels tests. This has been corrected.
• Running of the weekend tests on ldas-dev was inconclusive due to ldas-dev rebooting on Saturday morning. Testing of the new diskcacheAPI code for PR#3015 showed that the memory usage could be exceeded on a tandem system.

Advanced LIGO and Supporting R&D (Shoemaker)

Advanced LIGO Systems

Enhancements to initial LIGO (Rana Adhikari)

This new section will describe activity beyond the scope of the Advanced LIGO subsystemsrelevant to the initial LIGO enhancements.

From: Rana Adhikari <rana@its.caltech.edu>

• Design ongoing for the glass OMC + DC Readout bench
• Dark Port transverse mode structure being characterized on L1 this week. This is to inform the OMC cavity parameters and DC readout modeling.
• Further measurements on absorption in the L1 test masses are 
  happening to determine how much Thermal Compensation we will need.
• Tobin Fricke (grad student from Rochester @ Caltech) has started  work on prototyping the TCS laser stabilization system.

From: Hiroaki Yamamoto hiro@ligo.caltech.edu

Modeling and Simulation (Hiro Yamamoto)

e2e weekly meeting

Sany Yoshida explained the situation of the adv.LIGO MC simulation.
Frequency servo is implemented based on the design discussed in T970218.

Static IFO simulation (Hiro)

3D BS effect has been studied. Mike's calculation with bonding flat has been recalculated. There are some discrepancies, but the essential conclusion is that the loss due to the finite size of BS in the SRC is 1100ppm, while that in the PRC is 400ppm. One possibility to suppress the loss is to change the HR (50% reflection) side to the SRM, but then the thermal heating will become 3 times larger than the current orientation. If the CP is used to change the focal length to 40m with the beam size on BS is 4.5cm, then the geometrical effect is negligible (~10ppm).

Melody is working to expand a data management code which is used in this simulation package.

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

Bruce is cleaning up the implementation of the UserDefinedPrimitive, together with validating the code.

With the help of Ed Maros, a new CVS branch was created to maintain two version of code trees, original one and the new one with UserDefinedPrimitive. They will be merged after fully validation.

Melody is working with Bruce for the code validation and to finish up the alfi front end to support the UserDefinedPrimtive.

We are going to release a new version of alfi which requires JAVA 1.5 soon.

Mechanical Simulation for advanced LIGO (Sany and SLU team)

(Kinchen)

This week I continued evaluations of inverted pendulum and triple suspension models with ground noise input.  This is in contrast to white noise input which is less realistic.  My models this week were for the x translational effects on the suspended mirror.  I am preparing a LIGO note that includes a summary of the x translational and yaw motions of the horizontal table.

(Quave)

Worked on psuedo-frequency control digital filter and incorporating the design specified by P Fritschel in LIGO document T970218-02. Currently the response from the system in using this filter is unstable.

(Yoshida)

Continued working on the modal control modeling. Have found that the e2e model is unstable because the estimator filter is not correct. Will look into the problem

CDSPrestabilized Laser

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

AdLIGO PSL

After complaining to their headquarters I was swamped by phone calls from Beckhoff representatives, each saying they had problems with their e-mail server and thus causing the lack of response despite the fact that I did not e-mail them.  That aside the hardware that is to be used by the front-end laser has been ordered and will arrive shortly.  The only outstanding item is the flat-panel display computer, which should arrive in about a month's time.  On talking with an engineer at Beckhoff, they suggested communicating with the TwinCAT over TCP is easy and that one of their previous customers had already done this.  We shall see.

The paperwork to obtain the customised AdLIGO 2-W NPRO laser from InnoLight has been submitted.  I have been in contact with InnoLight on getting the same version that they agreed to supply to the AEI.

Control and Data Systems

From: Rolf Bork rolf@ligo.caltech.edu

AdvLigo

CDS Infrastructure:

• Continuing work on requirements document.
• We may have a fiber link ready to test by next week for our PCIe expansion chassis. Up to now, it has been an Infiniband cable with a limit of 10 meters.
• We are starting to look at implementing Josh's fiber timing receiver into our I/O expansion chassis. If we can do this, plus get the fiber link going as mentioned in the previous bullet, the only connections to remote computing and timing facilities will be via fiber.
• Testing prototypes of new lower noise AA/AI filters.
• Working with a vendor who is about to come out with an 18bit, 8 channel ADC plus 8 channel DAC module. They may be able to send us a unit to test as early as next week.
• Continued work on front end realtime computing software. Main emphasis has been to allow code for different systems and/or at different rates on the various CPU cores within a multi-CPU computer. The last piece of this is to get the TPMAN/AWG running properly with multiple systems in one box.
• Mohana Designed a general purpose table top box for such things as suspension Satellite amplifiers. The prototype from Hamilton will be delivered in two weeks.

HAM SAS:

• Ben is continuing install/test at Lasti. I believe the only remaining parts to ship are the Guralp cables, now due 2/2.
• Installed and tested the controls for the triple suspension that will be moved to LASTI HAMX.

ISI:

• Work continues on the schematic for the ISI electronics interface chassis.
• GS-13/L4C Emulation Board: Ben sent an initial design document to B. Lantz yesterday for comment.
• ISI Coil driver:  two boards have been stuffed. The Heat Sink Housing D070006-A metal work is back from the Hamilton. Mohana is putting together the two boards to test them. She is also designing the interface board.

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