Weekly Report for Week Ending March 22, 2007
Past Weekly Reports
The LIGO Executive
Committee Agenda for Monday, March 26, 2007 will be:
(Meeting time: 10:30 am Pacific Time)
Announcements
Programmatic (Marx)
LIGO Operations Financial Reports –
end of February
Comments on Weekly Report
LSC and Data Analysis (Saulson)
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)
Enhancements (Zucker)
Advanced LIGO (Shoemaker)
Change Control Board/Technical Review Board Session as
needed
There are no open change requests
Site and other business
issues:
Special Items:
The next
Staffing Committee meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, March 27, 2007 at 10:30 am
PDT.
Special
Announcements:
Weekly Report Highlights
No report – LSC meeting in Louisiana this
week.
LIGO
Laboratory Administration (Lindquist)
PROPERTY MANAGEMENT (Luna)
>
- Provided assistance to the Detector Group (H.
Armandula) with obtaining a Carnet to Export/Import without any
restrictions a Fused Silica Substrate to VIRGO, France. Account
Number LIGO.OPT - 5.4 - NSFLIGO.FY02ON.
- LIGO's CIT FY07 Equipment Inventory is
completed; all assets were accounted for and updated in Oracle (Caltech's
property records system).
- Assisted J. Worden at LLO by screening the
GSAXcess equipment database for a Genie/ Lift.
- Crated Property records for a Sun StoreEdge and
a Cisco 6504-E Switch.
- Created Property records for the new Ford Sedan
at LLO.
DOCUMENT CONTROL
CENTER (Turner, Mak)
>From: Cleveland Mak
<mak_c@ligo.caltech.edu>
- Completed boxing and transporting all
miscellaneous boxes of documentation that were located in the hallway
outside of the DCC.
- Concentrated on processing of LSC/Virgo
Scientific Collaborations Meeting presentations.
- Scanning Update - Scanning of miscellaneous large/bulky
"M" documents on file is complete. In our attempt to make
most of the documentation on file to eventually be electronically
accessible, scanning has begun on all non-electronic "E"
category documents on file.
Update to Current Document Management
System (Lindquist)
There was no meeting of the
“Plan B” committee Friday, March 16 or Friday, March 23 due to travel for the
LSC-VIRGO meeting and other considerations. However, a trial version of DocuShare with licenses for 50
users was set up for the LSC-VIRGO meeting and used for public posting of
documents. Some favorable comments have been
received. A debrief is planned for Friday, March 30.
FINANCIAL SYSTEMS (Funaro, Brambila,
Kaufman)
>
>From: "Brambila, Ruth"
<Ruth.Brambila@caltech.edu>
- Completed change order #7 to Galli and Morelli.
- Completed change order #1 to Battelle for LHO.
- Completed the subcontract to CSIRO and routed it
for approval.
- Completed the subcontract to QED.
- Working on the order for the hardware
maintenance for LHO so that it can fall within the cooperative agreement
time period.
>From: Florence Kaufman <fkaufman>
- No report – vacation. [There will be a review of the financial status for LIGO
Operations as of the end of February conducted during the excomm meeting
Monday, March 26 –pel]
- 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>
- A purchase order for $50,000 is being prepared
for Australian National University (ANU) of Canberra
for development of a tilt tip stage related to Advanced LIGO
seismic isolation.
>From: Ed Jasnow
<jasnow@ligo.caltech.edu>
- The final report of the Certified Purchasing
System Review (CPSR) of the Caltech purchasing system by the Office of
Naval Research (ONR) was forwarded to the Office of Sponsored Research and
then to the NSF for information. The approval of Caltech's
purchasing system will be a key factor in the NSF's review of Advanced
LIGO procurements.
- The kickoff meeting of the Pathfinder optics
polishing contract with QED Technologies is scheduled for March 27 in Rochester
, N.Y. Ed Jasnow,
GariLynn Billingsley, David Ottaway, and Peter Fritschel will be attending
for LIGO.
PROPOSALS and REPORTS (Lindquist)
LIGO is preparing a proposal to the NSF for
Continuing Operations for FY 2009 through FY 2013. A straw man budget
projection and an analysis of the effect of changing the indirect rate
structure as defined by OSR have been prepared. A meeting will be
scheduled with LIGO task managers to discuss the adequacy of staffing level
estimates.
CHANGE CONTROL/CONTINGENCY MANAGEMENT
(Lindquist)
- There are no open change requests.
HUMAN RESOURCES (Akutagawa)
>From: Cindy Akutagawa
<cindy@ligo.caltech.edu>
- The next Staffing
Committee meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, March 27th at
10:30am and the minutes and action items have been posted on the SC web
page.
Quality/Safety ( Tyler
)
>From: Bill Tyler tyler@ligo.caltech.edu
Conducted the second LIGO
safety committee meeting, but because of the LSC meeting attendance was limited,
and we limited our discussions and postponed actions to the next meeting in two
weeks.
LIGO Hanford
Observatory (LHO) and Interferometer Operations (Raab)
Summary of S5 Activities at LIGO Hanford
Observatory (compiled by K. Kawabe)
A week of LSC meeting in Louisiana. No
report was submitted by anybody staying in Hanford (thus nothing happened).
The duty cycle (Thu Mar/15 to Wed Mar/21
2007) of H1 and H2 were 88.4 and 91.9 percent, with about 15 and 6-7 Mpc binary
inspiral range, respectively.
Summaries: Range
and Duty Cycle update. Tuesday
maintenance summary.
LIGO Livingston
Observatory (LLO) and Interferometer Operations (Giaime)
No report.
Mechanical and Optical Systems (Coyne)
See Advanced
LIGO
Controls and Data Systems (Bork)
See Advanced LIGO
40-Meter Interferometer (Weinstein)
Rob gave a nice status
report on the 40m activities at the LSC meeting in Baton Rouge.
Osamu gave a nice report
on his e2e lock acquisition studies for AdLIGO arm cavities.
Go gave a nice talk on
the recent results from the vacuum squeezing injection experiment.
Kirk gave a nice talk on
plans for prototyping the new AdLIGO ISC scheme at the 40m.
IFO Commissioning, DC readout, Electronics,
Controls, Computers
- Not much activity, since most people are at the
LSC meeting.
- Doug Cook sent us a new JDSU NPRO to replace our
dying one. (JDSU model M126N-1064-700 SN 5519 from Hanford). It has been
received and tagged. We are making plans for when to install it.
- We had discussions with the AdLIGO optics group
about performing some experiments to measure scattering loss with the 40m
arm cavities, to determine whether the anomalous losses are due to coating
inhomogeneities, dust, or something else. This may involve venting in
order to drag-wipe the optics to remove dust. We are also looking into the
possibility of illuminating our test masses with UV light to discharge
them, potentially releasing the dust that sticks to their surface.
- Steve installed an
old Uniphase HeNe laser with two 50% beamspitters as oplevs for the BS,
SRM and PRM.
Thermal Noise
Interferometer (Black)
Greg went to the LSC meeting and gave the
TNI update. Akira
returned from Hanford. Ilaria
has started setting up a diagnostic cavity with the TNIs NPRO in preparation for
two measurements. First, we need a
spatially-filtered beam to get precise measurements of the focal length of
several lenses, in order to refine our measurement of the spot size inside
the arm cavities. Second, we want
to refine our characterization of the mirror response, and that requires
an accurate measurement of the laser's PZT response. We have measured this response before,
but we want to do it again with smaller error bars.
LASTI (Ottaway)
HAM SAS
This week we continued with the controls
development and prepared the system for vacuum. We have been plagued by a discrepancy in the output of the
calibrated geophones and guralps. A
huddle test was performed and we could got the spectra to match in shape but a
discrepancy of a gain of 4 still remains. We will need a calibrated shake test
to resolve this discrepancy. The
doors on the Ymid have been replaced and whillst we seen a reduction of the
seismic noise around 100 above 1 Hz we still observe significant noise
application at low frequency that is not coherent with the ground. Hopefully
our wind current noise can still hold up, this will be confirmed tomorrow as we
plan to pump down.
Quad Triple
The in-vacuum alignment of the cavity is
complete and flashes were observed at the transmitted port. We are completing
our final checks and will be ready to seal up tomorrow.
ISI
We have completed the disassembly and all parts
are boxed and ready to ship
General
We will begin pumping out the LASTI system
tomorrow.
CIT
Science Group (Weinstein)
Most everyone is at the LSC meeting
attending f2f meetings and giving talks.
Igor Yakushin
Presented the results of the coherent
waveburst analysis of the LIGO-VIRGO-GEO
project 2b data at the burst face-to-face meeting: http://ldas-jobs.ligo-la.caltech.edu/~igor/LV2/lv.html
The highlights of the presentation:
- Coherent waveburst can easily analyze
combinations of 2,3,4,5,...N (mis)aligned
detectors: in this study we used H1H2, H1L1, H1H2L1, H1H2L1V1, G1H1H2L1, G1H1H2L1V1 combinations;
- H1H2L1 or H1H2 combinations have the best
sensitivity for the used waveforms
(sine-gaussians from 361 to 2000Hz); adding more detectors to the network helps with sensitivity only if those
detectors are not too glitchy and
have stationary noise; during Sep 8-10, 2006 period covered by the project 2b, V1 noise was extremely
non-stationary due to angular motion
of mirrors induced by seismic noise; the problem is well understood by the VIRGO team and was fixed;
- On the other hand, the sky position
reconstruction of the source is the
best for 5 detector combination; surprisingly, waveburst also does a
reasonably good job reconstructing sky
position even for two misaligned detectors
- H1L1;
- L1 was more glitchy than H1 and H2 in project 2b
(however, it was a good time period
for L1 according to e-logs); as a result, although L1is more sensitive
than H2, H1H2 combination has better sensitivity for most of the waveforms than H1L1 combination; we
are investigating if H1L1 analysis
was done in the most optimal way or still can be improved;
- We are going to use the lessons learnt from this
exercise for S5 analysis and use
all the detector combinations to maximize the analyzed livetime.
Kent Blackburn
OSG DEVELOPMENT
- Spent a day training new hire, on basics of
using the Open Science Grid
from a user and application perspective. Have arrange to spend a day next week going
into more details.
OSG INTGRATION
OSG MANAGEMENT
- Worked with technical leads that were behind
schedule on WBS milestones to
gather accurate reports on late deliverables.
- Continued to work on Statements of Work, signing
the Indiana SOW as the OSG
Resources co-Manager.
- Continued search for one remaining open position
Laboratory Computing (Anderson)
LDAS Software (Maros)
This week saw another pre-release of the
LDAS software being installed on ldas-cit. The version is 1.8.496 and includes
modifications to properly handle the setting of DEVICE_IO_CONFIGURATION. An
issue has been observed where a file system was not recognized and the default
values were used. This condition is under investigation.
Work continues on flushing pending data on a
globus socket.
System testing used version 1.8.494 of the
LDAS software. The "all user commands" test which was terminating
early due to getMetaData cmd has a $::DB
in it imported from dev, has been fixed.
The rdsloop tests for S5 L4 frames has been
modified to correctly calculate the frameLength. The timeout value for
createRDS jobs in LJrun has been increased to allow enough time for the S5 L4
jobs to complete.
A new loop script testing getFrameData as
used by Mito on ldas-cit has been added to the nightly loop suite of tests to
better simulate real world usage.
LDAS
System Administration (Anderson)
Caltech
(Dan Kozak)
- Unstuck /archive on alterf (involved restarting
samshared on both alterf and dataserver-cit).
- Determined which LHO tapes were eligible for
shelf storage.
- Unstuck a non-staging file for JZ.
- Fixed prestager at LHO (created prestage
account).
- Did lots of work with Sun on the crashes of
ldas-cit & dataserver-cit. Submitted crash dumps, SunExplorer
output, etc. Installed interim fix and an associated patch (to fibre
channel support) and the problem seems to be resolved. Have been
following up with Sun engineers about what platforms/configurations are
affected (so we know where else this may be needed) and when a fully
supported patch will be available.
- Spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out
/home disk usage at CIT (i.e. who was using it up fastest). Got
Duncan Brown to release some files and stop running jobs for a while, ran
du -k to get a picture of where we stand.
- Helped Igor with flaky 3510 disk at LLO (did
rsync of /export, gave him the 3510 command to clone and replace the disk)
- Did the weekly ingest for LLO only (no tapes
from LHO last week due to problems with archiving at LHO).
- Did _lots_ of work to free up the "3rd
copy" of RDS data here at CIT. This is ongoing, but it looks
like we'll be able to free up ~500 tapes this way.
- Sent form letter about LSCdataFind usage to Lisa
Goggin & Anand.
- Have been playing with the ssd_max_throttle
kernel parameter on dataserver-cit to try to get rid of the FC tran_errors.
- Restored frame data to node177.
(Erik Espinoza)
- Built DNS Server w/ Larry to replace current DNS
Server.
- Regenerated reverse dns zones
- Fixed up records for bind9 (was bind8)
- Replaced node177 w/ node 500, rebuilt and
returned to production.
- Diagnosed node177, found bad fan vibrating
really hard.
- Troubleshooting ligo.org/cluster mail.
- Received memory from ASA.
- Put pre-release schedd into production on
ldas-pcdev1.
- Brought Einstein@Home mirror up @ CIT.
- Spent time working with Cisco on Trunk issue,
getting Sun involved.
- Awaiting ligo.org list to generate direct
aliases file for CIT.
- Worked on configs for LLO, LHO for e-mail.
- Will put into production once ligo.org stuff is
worked out
MIT
(Fred Donovan)
- Data 4, bad disks (2), reseated 3ware cards;
swapped one out.
- Smartd installed on
data1,data8,data9,data10,data11 w email notifications.
- Upgraded data 8. need to upgrade data2,3,6,7
from Redhat 9 and add smartd.
- Ordered 2 sata disks for data4 (offline).
Livingston
(Igor Yakushin)
- Cloned/failed disk id 5 in 3510 that
periodically generated 'Unrecoverable error' messages and replaced it with
a new disk that is now configured as a global spare.
- Fixed problems with CIT's segment database
replication.
- There was a problem with the frame disk cache
update propagating to the nodes: for some reason scp from beowulf was not
able to retrieve the original copy from gateway. The temporary fix was to
get the frame cache file from /ldas_outgoing through NFS.
Hanford
(Ben Johnson)
- Released "beta 1" of the Matlab NDS
client. It seems to work stably on the control room CDS solaris 9
machines. Currently, the only platform on site that it doesn't work on is
matlab R2007a on Windows XP. I hope that a simple recompile under that
platform will clear this up.
- Tape shipments resumed this week. I did not ship
tapes last week due to post-Sol10U3 archiver woes. The archiver is now
running so tape shipments should resume as per normal, hopefully for the
rest of the run.
- Doubled RAM from 2GB to 4GB in my workstation. I
should be able to run all the Linux VMs Greg needs to test LDG, whilst
giving 1GB to my Windows VM.
- Helping Dave Barker find a Linux distribution
that can run the applications he wants (EPICS medm, xmgrace, et al) on the
hardware he wants (x86_64 - with 2, 3, or 4 monitors). So far Gentoo seems
to be the most successful.
General
Computing (Wallace)
MIT
(Fred)
- Trial Docushare set up for conference (unix
& win platforms: using win platform);
- Meetingmaker set up on new machine
(ligocalendar; fc6) - need to transfer
database
- fc6 intel wireless for laptop (new kernel,
driver build, etc); web cgi finalized
for conference page; catfish spam/firewall back up;
- Usual user issues.
Livingston
(Dwayn & Shannon)
- Support for the LSC meeting.
Thanks to Mike for all his help. We
couldn't have done it without him.
Hanford
(Christine)
- The WAN and LAN GigE network connections were
moved to the new Cisco 6504
switch/router without any problems. It took a while to figure out
how to configure the 6504 because it is a
switch that does routing. I finally found a book from the Cisco Press
on the Catalyst switches that explained
how to set up the ports on the Supervisor Engine to do Layer 3 routing. Next step is to get the backup
network working. I've called Lockheed
Martin, the keepers of the Hanford site fiber, to do an OTDR and clean some of the patches on the circuit.
- Working with Ruth to purchase a renewal and
upgrade on the Cisco equipment
maintenance contract.
- Received the DVDs for Matlab 2007a.
Problem is that my license server does
not have a DVD reader. Spent some time figuring out how to mount a
remote DVD drive.
- Renewed the software maintenance for
Mathematica.
- Started installing the Veritas back up software
on the file server, but can't find
or possibly never received the license certificate. Had to call Symantec to get a new certificate sent
out.
- The LIGO MRTG graphs on the ESnet web site have
been broken for several
months. A disclaimer on the ESnet web page says they are testing a beta version and to report any
problems. I reported my problem,
but have not heard back and the graphs still don't work.
- Other misc. user support
CIT
(Mike)
- This week I worked with Shannon & Dwayne on
setup and supporting users at the
LSC conference. (BTR LA)
(Veronica)
- LSC: Ongoing support of the March meeting.
Updates of the meeting website,
installed a webpage for post-conference posting of the transparencies, the talks are being posted as
DCC processes them. Updates of the
database of technical papers under review.
- LIGO: Most time was spent on the makeover of the
homepage. Continued work on
the LAAC website: an update tool for the databases of past/current students, which runs on Webbase with
its proprietary markup language;
probably would be better off migrating it to a more mainstream system. Other web updates.
(Larry)
- Worked on a couple of procurement and license
items. Reconciled p-card items.
Working on getting quotes for a couple of
different notebook computers. Purchased a number of
misc. cables and support items for the computer room.
- Built a new system to act as the DNS server.
Worked with Erik and now have the
files installed and plan on setting up the system in the next few days. Just a few more things to check out.
- Worked with Veronica on a couple of different
web issues. Mostly, assisting on
testing the new webpage on different platforms.
- Made some minor modifications in the computer
room. Still working on getting it
better organized.
- Assisted a couple of users with reinstallation
of their runtime java. The update
did not work properly which caused problems with connecting to the Kronos system.
- Spent time checking out the router. Planning on
making some changes to make things
a little more efficient.
- Assisted in a number of areas with the mail
services. The ligo.org roster has
been turned over to the PSU group and they have been working a number of issues related to that
move. Modified a number of aliases
here and setup a couple for individuals to edit for their needs.
- Assisted a couple of people with web page
setups. One was a configuration
issue and the other just needed a few files updated.
(Christian)
- Upgraded Gina Salone and Cindy Akutagawa to new
Adobe Acrobat 8.
- I did an inventory on printing supplies.
- Toner cartridge replacements- 3flr W/B, 2flr W/B
and Irene Baldon local printer.
- Continue testing and learning about MS Vista to
be really for the Vista conference
next week.
- Other misc.: Continued onsite software/phone
support.
Advanced LIGO and
Supporting R&D (Shoemaker)
No
report.
For additional information about this
report, contact Albert Lazzarini
or Phil Lindquist