Weekly Report for Week Ending February 8, 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: The NSF included Advanced LIGO in their 2008 budget request, a very significant step forward for Advanced LIGO. It is the result of the hard work, but more importantly the high quality of the work, being done on Advanced LIGO and in the LSC more generally.

Weekly Report Highlights: LHO operating routinely above 15 Mpc!

LSC Issues (Saulson)

LIGO Laboratory Administration (Lindquist)

PROPERTY MANAGEMENT (Luna)

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

• Assisted Rolf Borke with the shipping and the preparation of a Commercial Invoice for US Customs clearance for two PCI-X Analog to Digital Converter Boards, two Digital I/O Modules, two Anti-Alias Filter Chassis, two Anti-Image Filter Chassis and two 6" Ribbon Cables to the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Waves in Germany.(B. Willke).  Account Number LIGO2.ADV-1-OAIC.LIGO2ADV.
• Created and sent out equipment Inventory list for LHO.
• Continued working on LIGO's Equipment Inventory @ CIT.
• Worked with Gina Salone and Annie Walden on creating a supplier expense report to reflect LIGO's monthly overhead cost for Caltech and the Observatories.
• Tagged and created Property records for one Dynamic Signal Analyzer for Rich Abbott @ CIT.

DOCUMENT CONTROL CENTER (Turner, Mak)

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

• Met with Larry from Safety to review concerns in the new storage room.  There were aisle width and egress issues.  A new layout that satisfies these safety concerns was devised and submitted to PMA for signoff.
• Continued to go through unmarked engineering drawings and either numbering or archiving as pre-LIGO.  About 50% have been labeled and readied for storage.
• Continued working with Bill Tyler on creating a database of incident reports from the sites, MIT, and Caltech.  Received all known incident reports from Livingston and have sorted them by year and date and compared them to those already on file in the DCC.  Still awaiting more incident reports that Bill has and those from MIT.  We are on target for completing at least the Hanford and  Livingston reports by mid-February.

BRIDGE CONSOLIDATION OF LIGO LABORATORY PERSONNEL

• Assisting Eric Gustafson on beginning the coordination of LIGO consolidation into W. Bridge following construction of the new astrophysics laboratory on the south side of Califnornia Blvd.  Set up bi-weekly status meetings with Albert and Eric to meet the April 1st deadline for a preliminary plan to PMA.  Worked with Eric on first things needing to be done to get a picture of space needs.  Working up floor plan models to use for notes and people placement.  Additionally, will add up raw square footage to be given up against anticipated new square footage assigned in Bridge.  This should be completed by Friday, February 9th.

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

• Continued to process MOU's.
• Processed/packaged about 30 empty printer toner cartridges for recycling.
• Prepared all non-electronic "P" documents for scanning.
• Scanning Update - Scanning of old CBI Assembly Records Pkg files is complete.  Scanning of all non-electronic "P" files has begun.

Update to Current Document Management System (Lindquist)

The committee did not meet Friday, February 2.  The next meeting is scheduled for Friday, February 9.

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>

• Completed mod 38 to GSI and submitted to vendor.
• Revised modification 27 to REO and re-submitted to vendor.
• Completed the change order to Varian to cover pending invoices.
• Completed the renewal of the hardware maintenance support for Year 2 for LLO.
• Completed change order for Eric Myers and submitted to vendor.
• Working on the LSU modification.
• Completed the modification to Northrop Grumman and submitted for approval.
• Re-routed the revised modification to MIT for approval.

>From: Florence Kaufman <fkaufman>

• Completed report for FY2007 Operations and R&D as of the end of January and posted the report on the network.
• Responded to requests to provide additional information for some of the information on the Payroll Distribution Confirmation Reports that account managers have been requested to review and approve, before final approval by Jay Marx.
• 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>

• Dennis Coyne, Ed Jasnow, Florence Kaufman, and Gina Salone met to review the status of invoices for the HAM-SAS prototype effort.

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

• The two contracts for the Pathfinder optics substrate polishing are being assembled and are expected to be released next week.  The two contracts are to CSIRO and QED Technologies.

PROPOSALS and REPORTS (Lindquist)

A proposal for Continuing Operations (2009-2013) is due to the NSF this summer.  We will meet with the NSF for discussions next week.  I will be publishing a proposed outline and assignments.

CHANGE CONTROL/CONTINGENCY MANAGEMENT (Lindquist)

• The LIGO change control board recommended approval of CR070001 on Monday (February 5) to add funds to pay for the HAM SAS prototype effort.  I have prepared minutes (LIGO-M070026).  The original signed copy of the change request with concurrence emails will be retained in the LIGO DCC.
• There are no open change requests.

HUMAN RESOURCES (Akutagawa)

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

• No report.  The next staffing committee meeting will be February 26, 2007.

Quality/Safety (Tyler)

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

The last LIGO campus safety audit (40M Lab) is scheduled for Friday.

The LDAS Computing and LIGO Server Facilities safety audits were conducted earlier this week.  The audit team was pleased to find no significant safety or "housekeeping" issues during the audits.

We are working with the Advanced LIGO Project to establish a consulting contract for high power laser safety support.

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

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

Peaceful week with solid performance after successful commissioning break.

Duty cycle (Thu Feb/1 to Wed Feb/7) of H1 was been 92.9 percent with 14 - 15.5 Mpc inspiral binary range. For H2 it was 92.8 percent with 6 - 7 Mpc range.

Summaries: Range and Duty Cycle update. Tuesday maintenance summary.

Highlights from the LHO elog are listed below:

• During weekend, H1 performed respectably at 14+ Mpc with micro seismic velocity as high as 1 um/s.
• H2 range was found to drop once in a while, and this dip in range seems to be caused by many hairs between 100 and 300 Hz, which might be related to low frequency noise.
• The above mentioned noise might be related to something in ITMY (see this and this). It's still inconclusive, though.
• A 30 minutes periodicity was found in H2 noise.
• Gold plate stopped working and then it fixed itself.
• On Monday 6PM online binary search stopped working. As of this writing (Thursday afternoon) it's still down, and people are working hard to understand and fix the problem.
• Following the measurements in the commissioning break, NoiseBudget code is under renovation (for example see this).
• Some more line analysis for power supply.
• Some analysis for H1 coil current and up-conversion.

Outreach:

• D. Ingram took the "LIGO Road Show" to Omak in north central WA on 1/31 and 2/1. 350 Omak students in grades 6-8 interacted with a dozen portable hands-on LIGO-flavored activities dealing with light, wave behavior and resonance.

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 belowReported 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

Mechanical and Optical Systems (Coyne)

See Advanced LIGO

Controls and Data Systems (Bork)

See Advanced LIGO

40-Meter Interferometer (Weinstein)

No report - Alan is traveling

Thermal Noise Interferometer (Black)

No report

LASTI (Ottaway)

  No report

CIT Science Group (Weinstein)

 ______________
Kent Blackburn

TCLGLOBUS

Mary Lei and Michael Samidi are still setting up
ldasbox1.ligo.caltech.edu (64-bit machine) instead of
ldasbox4.ligo.caltech.edu (32-bit machine) for running valgrind
to investigate LDAS managerAPI coredumps using Globus threaded
libraries.

Still investigating GSI authentication failure on Opteron systems.
Michael Samidi is still working on providing more details to Globus
team for Bug #4946. Tested with OpenSSL from command line and it
seems there is certificate misconfiguration.

OpenSSL memory leaks within Globus Toolkit 4.0.3 has been addressed
in Bug #4743 (http://bugzilla.globus.org/globus/show_bug.cgi?id=4743).
Michael Samidi will find out if this bug will be included in Globus
Toolkit 4.0.4 (est. March 2007)


GRID APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT:

Testing several OSG sites (PSU, Purdue_ITaP, UWMilwaukee, Fermilab and
STAR_BNL) for meeting the second OSG milestone, running LIGO workflow
on OSG with 100 or more CPU slots for one week.
After running 2 days (Feb 5 - Feb 6) with 100 or more CPU slots, all
workflows died at 7 PM on Feb 7, 2007. This could be due to bug
discovered in the latest Condor version (6.9.x) installed on
osg-itb-se.ligo.caltech.edu.

Still testing full HIPE at LDG CIT cluster with job clustering with
a new Pegasus property to enable sysmlinks and third-party trasnfer
at the same time. Submitting HIPE workflow to ldas-grid is still
causing high load on the gatekeeper. This is due to the workflow is
submitted through Condor-G. Michael Samidi is still working with
Karan Vahi to investigate the problem.

Completed moving LIGO GWFs from CIT repository to UCSD SRM server.

Still working on SRM problem at UCSD with Karan Vahi.
The problems are submitting srmcp jobs using Condor-G fails
and missing a single quote surrounding SRM URL in the submit
script.

OPEN SCIENCE GRID VALIDATION TESTBED

Attended VTB telecom related to CEMon problems

OPEN SCIENCE GRID INTEGRATION TESTBED

Validated one additional ITB sites with nanoHIPE application.

Installed Condor 6.8.4 after bug appeared in Condor-G 6.9.1 on
submit host. Upgraded TclProxy host to be a second Condor-G
submit host to allow more jobs on the OSG.

Reorganized ITB Twiki SiteValidationTableITB052 to segment
sites based upon capabilites and functionality.

Continued to test new fixes provided by FNAL developers of
CEMon.

Worked with Michael Samidi and Kent Blackburn to refine
submission sites for OSG milestone.

Successfully tested ws-gram interface on LIGO-CIT-ITB.

Attended weekly DASWG, ITB and Pegasus telecoms.

______________
Duncan Brown

- Continued to generate more numerical waveforms and work comparison
between these and post-Newtonian templates.

- Found and fixed bugs in the LAL 3.5pN inspiral phasing code.

- Constructed a set of data quality flags that can be used to perform
a blind hardware injection challenge on the 1 calendar year BNS run,
as a prelude to the real blind challenge.

- Worked with Drew on S5 1yr search.

- Worked with Diego in implementation of physical template family.

- Helped Patrick with some xpipeline work.

- Release a new version of glue.

______________
Gregory Mendell

I have generated more "fscan" spectrograms and spectra of channels
during times from last month's commissioning period when Robert
Schofield connected ripple boards to various power supplies. The latest
elog is here:
http://ilog.ligo-wa.caltech.edu/ilog/pub/ilog.cgi?group=detector&date_to_view=02/02/2007&anchor_to_scroll_to=2007:02:02:18:40:03-gmendell

Laboratory Computing (Anderson)

LDAS Software (Maros)

LDAS System Administration (Anderson)

General Computing (Wallace)

MIT

(Fred)

• Swapped tintagel (new disk, install xp prof, etc) for the present solidworks machine, as mb on tintagel  has pci-e;  this is re: upgrade video card (w advice from our sw var) to handle bigger assemblies.
• Some housekeeping, consolidating, etc. usual sys adm (user accounts, wireless, etc.) rc'd esata enclosure

Livingston

(Dwayne)

• replaced a dead monitor on an SEC exhibit
• LSC meeting preparation, gathering A/V and network requirements
• GC backup was stalling, restarted software, added new tapes, all is well
• CUR cleanup
• user having issues printing while connected to VPN.  have a couple of possible solutions but have yet to implement either.
• spam filter settings changes
• spam filter cleanup
• other usual user requests and support

(Shannon)

• Saturday, the switch in the communications closet died.  Came in Saturday morning and replaced it with a temporary switch.  Have a replacement on order from Foundry as the old was was out of warranty. The switch failure caused some issues with wireless and machines in the office areas of the corner station.
• Ran some Nessus scans of machines at LLO.
• Worked a bit when time permitted on the vulnerability assessment for LLO.
• Looked into the specs on some wireless APs for GC from Foundry.  Need to compare to the HP ProCurve units that Christine has evaluated.
• Analyzed some traffic that was a bit suspicious (destined for what appears to be a broadcast address offsite).  Still looking into it.
• Went to the LSC location Wednesday to look at the hotel and talk to the network folks to see what will be needed to accommodate  200 people with laptops.  Still looking into this.  It may be an issue.

Hanford

(Christine)

• Finished setting up the server that will act as the clone of the main file/NIS+ server.  The first of the 730 GB disk raid systems is set up and is rsync'ing the home directories from the main disk system.
• In setting up the new disk system, discovered that the SCSI PCI cards I purchased are not compatible with Solaris 8.  I bought LSI-R cards and only LSI-S cards work with Solaris 8.  I was able to borrow the correct card from CDS, now I have to arrange to exchange my wrong cards.
• Started patching all the "guest" computers, servers and network equipment for the daylight savings time changes.
• Worked with Ben to get the Control Room GC Fedora box updated with lscsoft and cvs.  Keith Thorne wanted to use it to demonstrate how to use Matlab to read/analyze frame files.  Although it works on the Linux box, Keith ended up demonstrating the procedures on a GC Solaris computer as this was aimed at the Operators who more often use Solaris boxes.
• I'm trying to get SSH mail tunneling working on a user's MAC laptop. I found a GUI that is supposed to make the tunneling easier to set up, but I think that the encryption used is not compatible with the NIS+ encryption.  Also working on NFS mounting the user's home directory from the Solaris server to his MAC laptop.
• Still working on a problem with excel files being sent by Netscape through email arrive corrupted.
• I'm still waiting for the Dell technician to come out and replace the heat sync and power supply on a new laptop.  I've been waiting 3 days for what is supposed to be next business day on site service.  They seem to be under staffed in Eastern Washington.
• I have the new Cisco router configured and will test it during next Tuesday's maintenance period.

CIT

(Veronica)

• LSC:  Ongoing support of the March meeting.  Installed an online registration tool.  Later, modified the database and did re-scripting according to the changed specs.  Configured the online credit card payment gateway and integrated it into the website; the setup has changed since last time and the changes are not yet documented, so this took a fair amount of troubleshooting.  Worked with campus Finances on troubleshooting the setup configuration between the gateway and the merchant service provider.

Updates of various LSC-related webpages.  User support.

• LIGO:  Mailing lists updates.  Website updates.
• CaJAGWR:  Website updates.

(Bruce Sears)

• iLog Maintenance:  (0.5 days);   General iLog maintenance (user adds, keyword adds, systems work, etc.)

(Christian)

• Norna Robertson- Installed and configured MS Project 2003.
• 40 Meter- Mike and I replaced bad network printer.
• The fans in the display case needed to be replaced.
• Continue testing and learning about MS Vista and Office 2007.
• Worked on the Spam Filters with Mike and Larry.
• Other misc.: Continued onsite software/phone support.

(Larry)

• Continual work on procurement issues. Assisted Gina with a number of items. Still trying to get the phone company to correct some of their billings.
• Working on a notebook procurement and a few more LCD monitors.
• Working with PMA and others on the moving of equipment and related items to different rooms.
• Mike and I have started moving computer equipment to different locations. Assisted in getting a number of items turned over to CIT transportation. Worked with the CIT engineering group and PMA on the changes being made for the computer rooms.
• Started working on the logistics of getting machines patched for the new Daylight Savings Time change. There are a number of people working on this but it is still surprising the number of people that still are not aware of this.
• Worked on the computer rooms, mostly rearranging items.
• Working on computer related reports for Kent. Still quite a bit to do for him.
• Moving accounts over to the new system. Still a few minor tweaks.
• Stuart discovered a locking service not running properly on the server but that has been resolved.
• Worked with Veronica and Bonnie and the upcoming LSC mtg. to be held in Baton Rouge.
• Debugged a couple of different computers for the endusers.
• Worked the spam filters. Still over 10K/day of bad e-mail getting removed on the server but a lot is still getting through.
• Assisted a couple of users with cleaning up their e-mail files.
• Various accounts and aliases have been modified or removed.

(Mike)

• Working on building a web server. Loaded the latest Solaris 10, and configured Apache with SSL. This is to update and replace ligo.org.
• Started moving users over to our new Home account file server.
• Worked on a few of the NTSRV's that are still running Server 2000. We need to access these servers remotely due to some recent hiccups. We are now able to maintain these servers as well as the 2003 servers remotely.
• Additional cleanup work in both server rooms getting ready for a safety inspection. It looks like we passed.
• Continued work on mail servers plus searching for false positives on the Spam Filters.
• Worked on moving my Eudora pop3 email over to IMAP. Eudora is not that mail tool to use for IMAP, especially if you have a lot of mail boxes. Thunderbird is my option to use with IMAP, Eudora has to go away if you switch users over to IMAP.
• Worked with Larry in moving equipment.
• Replaced printer in the 40M.
• Other misc. user support and sysadmin tasks.

Advanced LIGO and Supporting R&D (Shoemaker)

The NSF included Advanced LIGO in their 2008 budget request, a very significant step forward for Advanced LIGO. It is the result of the hard work, but more importantly the high quality of the work, being done on Advanced LIGO and in the LSC more generally.

Advanced LIGO Systems

From: Hiroaki Yamamoto hiro@ligo.caltech.edu

Modeling and Simulation (Hiro Yamamoto)

e2e weekly meeting

• Sany Yoshida explained his progress of implementing the modal control of the triple suspension.
• Mark Barton, from LASTI, suggested various issues to make sure the e2e based implementation is doing the same thing as the SIMLINK based model.

Static IFO simulation (Hiro)

• The effect of BS in a machelson cavity was studied and it is concluded that the BS loss due to finite aperture and flat contribute in each path, i.e., the loss ~1000ppm in the AR side with 37cm diameter is a serious issue.
• Melody fixed a few issues of the database code in the model.

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

• Bruce is cleaning up the UserDefinedPrimitive code and documentation.

Mechanical Simulation for advanced LIGO (Sany and SLU team)

(Quave)

• Evaluated and modified results from LSC and frequency filters in triple cavity model (for AdvLIGO Input Mode Cleaner) and attained similar results to original theoretical results made by P. Fritschel. I am now setting up and installing a VNC server on our local machine (on campus).

(Kinchen)

• This week I have been running models isolating the triple pendulum system. The purpose is to analyze the reactions of our current feedback filter to the yaw motion of mass three. To do this I have limited the disturbing force to the actuation force in our model.  My intention is to observe the response of the feedback filter to the motion of mass three exclusive of any other external force.

(Yoshida)

• Continued  e2e modeling of the modal control for the AdvLIGO triple suspension Yaw DOF. By measuring the control loop transfer function, optimized the dc gain of the control filter. This makes the system much more stable, and mode 1 (three masses yaw in the same direction ) is clearly damped. However, the damping performance of mode 2 and 3 (the lower/middle mass yaws in a different direction) is not satisfactory. Further analysis will be conducted.

ALFI : e2e front end (Melody, Bruce)

• Melody and Bruce are working to write a documentation how the UserDefinedPrimitive implemented. This covers the end user documentation as well we the lowest level information how the code is written and work.
• Bruce fixed Alfi release creation script and other associated files such as the E2E key for the signing of ALfi jar files for the update to Java 1.5..

CDSPrestabilized Laser

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

• Rolf and I met with the SoCAL representatives of Beckhoff Automation. We discussed the issue of communicating with their proprietary TwinCAT software with real-time Linux and their field engineer suggested a solution that provides a clean break with whatever LZH provides and us.  The task remains to read up on the tonnes of programming information about TwinCAT and purchase the additional interface hardware they suggested.  After a period of time during which we familiarise ourselves with the hardware and a little with the software, the Beckhoff engineer said that they would come out and help us.
• I forwarded the first draft of the PSL safety plan to Benno, who made a minor modification related to the optical fibres for the pump diodes. It's by no means a finished article but at least is a good starting point, in my (biased) opinion.

From: Rolf Bork rolf@ligo.caltech.edu

ISC

• Got quotes for the costs of coating aluminum samples (4"X4" plates) with flame-sprayed aluminum.  $65 per plate for Aluminum Nitride, $48 per plate for Aluminum Oxide.  These coatings are candidates for improving the thermal properties of electronics enclosures in vacuum systems.
• Spent a lot of time working out the ISC budget.  I believe I now have the right combination of numbers to reflect reality.
• Received ceramic ring heaters from Watlow Inc. that are to be used on the OMC thermal actuator.
• Working out details with the hermetic box manufacturer for in-vacuum DCPD enclosure.  This type of solution will be useful for any party wishing to house electronics in a clean vacuum environment.

HAM SAS

• Recieved a late breaking requirement to provide computer controls for the stepper motors. We have purchased and received an I/O module for this and will begin work on the necessary software

---

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