Weekly Report for Week Ending May 24,
2007
Past Weekly Reports
There will be no LIGO Executive Committee scheduled Monday, May
28, 2007 due to the holiday.
Special
Announcements:
Weekly Report
Highlights
LSC Issues (Reitze)
LIGO
Laboratory Administration (Lindquist)
PROPERTY MANAGEMENT (Luna)
>From: Rod Luna
<rluna@ligo.caltech.edu>
- Provided documentation to justify tax exemptions
for purchases on LHO and LLO accounts. (Finance Tax Audit).
- Continued working in P-card Equipment Purchase
Orders for FY05 and FY06.
- Tagged and created Property records for a
Pumping Station System (L. Cardenas at CIT).
- Currently working with US Customs in providing
supporting documentation for the Glass Mass from University of Glasgow.
- Provided assistance to O. Miyakawa
with obtaining a Carnet to Export / Import without any restrictions a File
Server to the TAMA project, Japan. Account Number
LIGO.DET-1.4.1-NSFLIGO.FY02ON.
- Provided assistance to O. Miyakawa
with Packing, shipping and the preparation of a Commercial Invoice for US
Customs Clearance of a File Server to the TAMA project, Japan.
Account Number LIGO.DET-1.4.1-NSFLIGO.FY02ON.
- Provided assistance to the Detector Group (H. Armandula) with
receiving the Fused Silica Blank from Batiment
Virgo, France. Account Number LIGO.OPT - 5.4 - NSFLIGO.FY02ON.
DOCUMENT CONTROL CENTER (Turner, Mak)
>From: Cleveland Mak
<mak_c@ligo.caltech.edu>
- Concentrated mainly on processing presentations
for the LIGO/Virgo Collaborations Meeting this week in Italy.
- Scanning Update - Scanning of all non-electronic "L"
category documents is now complete. Progress continues on the
scanning of all non-electronic "M" category documents.
Document Management System - Plan B
(Lindquist)
I have no new information to report.
As far as I know there was no meeting of the committee last week.
FINANCIAL SYSTEMS (Funaro,
Brambila, Kaufman)
>From: "Funaro,
Catherine" <Catherine.Funaro@caltech.edu>
>From: "Brambila,
Ruth" <Ruth.Brambila@caltech.edu>
- Transferred funds on the Exploratorium as
requested. The subcontract remains expired.
- Obtained the completed University of Michigan
A133.
- Obtained updated certs
from Triad and Heraeus Quartz.
- Issued the purchase order for the seismometers
for MIT.
- Issued the purchase order for the clean room.
- Working on completing the order for the four HAM
plates.
- Received another requisition for an
invoice-attached order, which the vendor informed me that they have
already received payment for this invoice on a credit card order. I am
waiting to receive a confirmation from the cardholder before rejecting the
requisition.
- Competed mod. 29 and submitted to REO.
Received the signed modification.
- Mailed out the modification to Yamilet.
- Waiting to hear back on the correction of the
MIT modification so that it can be routed.
>From: Florence Kaufman <fkaufman>
- Prepared and sent out funding realignment
requests to Project Accounting.
- Sent request to Property Services and Project
Accounting to close the fabrication accounts LIGO.DAQ Tasks 1, 2 and
3. Approval to close these accounts received from Rolf Bork.
- Prepared a spreadsheet showing how Enhanced LIGO
budget has been allocated to various fabrication accounts.
- Sent out inquiries to various managers to
determine whether certain encumbrances and accounts needed to remain open.
- 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 contract is being prepared for Australian National University (ANU) to help build a prototype of the TIP-Tilt design
for Advanced LIGO. The contract was held up while the appropriate
account codes were decided on and put in the system.
>From: Ed Jasnow
<jasnow@ligo.caltech.edu>
- The NSF has informally approved the contract
with HPD for the HAM-SEI fabrication, assembly, and test. Formal
approval is expected to be given tomorrow, May 25, but the contract is
being readied for transmittal to HPD for signature now.
- P-Card and TechMart
training classes have been scheduled for site personnel. The current
schedule calls for the training of LHO personnel on the afternoon of
Monday, June 11, and for LLO personnel from 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., on
Tuesday, June 26.
PROPOSALS and REPORTS (Lindquist)
Substantial material has been received for
the FY 2009-13 Continuing Operations proposal. However, there are
significant holes remaining. Our objective is to have a draft for review
by the PAC mid-June. An outline of the text with status and links to the
text has been provided on the Operations Proposal Web page. Please see me
if you need access.
A strawman
“stickman” budget for FY 2009 – FY 2013 has also been made
available on the web site.
CHANGE CONTROL/CONTINGENCY MANAGEMENT
(Lindquist)
I will put the following change requests on
the agenda for a meeting of the LIGO Change Control Board as soon as
possible. This is likely to be scheduled during the week of June 11.
- Change Request CR070004 submitted by P. Fritschel and D. Coyne requests the release of FY 2007
and FY 2008 budget to cover a priority subset of the Advanced LIGO
"wish list" items.
- Change Request CR-070005, submitted by M. Zucker, D. Ottaway, and R. Mittleman, requests funds to replace the aging main
turbo pumps for the LAST facility at MIT
- Change Request CR070006 submitted by M. Zucker modifies the budget for Advanced LIGO, Enhanced
LIGO (ELI) Fabrications.
HUMAN RESOURCES (Akutagawa)
>From: Cindy Akutagawa
<cindy@ligo.caltech.edu>
- The next Staffing Committee meeting is scheduled
for June 18.
- A Staffing Committee meeting was held on May 14
and the minutes and action items are in progress and when completed will
be posted on the SC web page.
- All files for the Staffing Committee are
up-to-date and posted on the SC web page.
- Preparing for the arrival and orientation of the
REU/SURF students.
Quality/Safety (Tyler)
>From: Bill Tyler tyler@ligo.caltech.edu
The main effort this week was to get the
drafts of the LIGO Safety and Laser Safety Plans into the DCC so folks can
review the revisions (and for the NSF review).
LIGO Hanford
Observatory (LHO) and Interferometer Operations (Raab)
Summary of S5 Activities at LIGO Hanford Observatory
(compiled by K. Kawabe)
H1 performed well in general. The duty cycle
(Thu May/17 to Wed May/23) of H1 was 80.5 percent. At times, it kept solid at 16
Mpc for hours. In contrast, H2 continued to be rougher, with
the duty cycle of 72.1 percent and with horrendous excess noise coming back
once in a while. Some
useful commissioning activities both for H1 and H2.
Summaries: Range
and Duty Cycle update. Tuesday maintenance summary.
Highlights
from the LHO elog
Outreach
- Business is always brisk in May. LHO will
perform 15 on-site tours and 7 outreach visits to off-site venues during
the month. Visiting schools will come from as far as Spokane
and Olympia.
LIGO Livingston
Observatory (LLO) and Interferometer Operations (Giaime)
S5 Run (Antonio Lucianetti)
- During the last week, L1 collected 78.6 %
science data. The binary inspiral range
varied between 12 and 14.5 Mpc depending on
seismic motion.
- On Tue May 22, after the regularly scheduled
maintenance period, the binary inspiral
range stayed unusually low below 14 Mpc. This
led to the discovery that the AS1 beam was mis-steered.
The problem was fixed. Once the optics warmed up and the mechanical
resonances dumped down, the range has been reasonable good and higher
than 14 Mpc. On Wed May 23, logging about 1
Km south west of the X-end station caused the binary inspiral range to stay below 14 Mpc
for many hours.
DC Readout Studies (Valera
Frolov)
- After locking the interferometer in the DC
readout configuration (10 pm DARM loop offset, ASPD1 beam redirected tothe OMC cavity, the OMC cavity locked to the
carrier light, the DARM dof locked to
the OMC transmitted light) we installed an additional whitening
filter in the DC readout photo detector electronics chain. This
provided about an order of magnitude reduction of the electronics
noise contribution to DARM. The interferometer noise in the DC readout
scheme is within a factor of 3 from the S5 reference noise curve (bns of 15 Mpc) above 1
kHz and within a factor of 10 between 100 Hz and 1 kHz.
- The improved DC readout sensitivity allowed us
to proceed with measurements of the laser frequency and amplitude
noise coupling to the dark port. The investigation of the effect of
the DARM fringe offset on the angular alignment is also underway.
CDS Computing (Lisa Bogue)
- Spent a significant portion of this week working
on documentation. Wrote a printable guide for recovering cds after a partial power outage. Worked
with the operations staff to determine what documentation is still
missing.
- Began researching security options for the
control room.
- Received new sun equipment. Starting to unbox things.
LLO Outreach (John Thacker)
- Prepared and delivered two school programs.
- Prepared Docent Training material for 5/31
training session.
- Updated outreach website.
- Hosted star party Saturday evening, May 19th,
for Baton Rouge Astronomical Society.
- First RET teacher is now settled in
and working on summer project.
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
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
- After last week's dewhitening
board modifications, Rob measured the noise at the coil drivers for the
face coils of our four test masses at around 300Hz (near the minimum of
the new dewhite transfer function), with SUSPOS
damping on. As expected, there is significantly less noise with dewhitening on.
- Tobin encoutered test
point problems with the dither alignment system (c1ass). Alex's expertise
is needed.
- Steve continues to improve his photography
skills, capturing clear pics of the pattern of
point scatters on all four test masses with the arms locked. Cheryl Vorvick at LHO has been helping to interpret the pics, identifying the same point scatters from two
different views of ETMX.
- After Steve completes his photographic odyssey
of the point scatters on the test mass optics, we plan to vent in the next
couple of weeks to drag wipe the optics.
- Steve replaced the oplev
HeNe laser used for BS/PRM/SRM with a new JDS
one. He is now retuning the spot diameters on the oplev
QPDs.
- We ordered a new PC for the SURF students (Dell Optiplex).
- We would like to retire op140m, the Sun E450
"refrigerator". We'll need help from Alex to decommission the
services it performs.
DC Detection
- After modifying the test mass dewhitening filters, Rob took some DC readout noise
spectra with the PRFPMI. There is significant noise reduction in the 80 -
400 Hz region. He implemented a "cheesy" MICH
feedforward path (feeding the MICH signal to the ITMs),
and made further improvement in the noise between 80 and 300 Hz. The
spectrum above 800 Hz is unchanged, bottoming out at 2e-18 m/rtHz at 1 kHz.
- Rob has been taking a series of measurements of
transfer functions from noise sources to DARM with DC readout and RF
readout, including laser intensity noise and RF oscillator phase noise. Interpretation of the plots are in progress.
- The DCPD is stuffed, and in its pipe nipple. Ben
is almost finished testing the DCPD, and should be delivering it early
next week. Steve will order a new pair of end flanges for the nipple, and
Bob will get the whole lot cleaned and baked.
Vacuum Squeezing
- Go (with help from Osamu via videophone) retook
a noise spectrum with the SRMI and redid the calibration. The noise is
8e-17 m/rtHz at the shot-noise limited frequency
range around 10 kHz. This was the remaining measurement before finalizing
the squeezing-enhanced paper and releasing it.
Lab Infrastructure, Bake Lab
- Rob and Steve gave a tour of the 40m to a bunch
of Chilean student visitors.
- Bob has completed the vacuum prep for the LASTI
SEI system, and has now moved on to the SUS noise prototype for LASTI, and
the housing for the eLIGO DC PD amplifier.
Thermal Noise Interferometer (Black)
- The mode cleaner has been acting up and lost
alignment. We don't yet know the cause, but Ilaria
appears to have recovered the alignment. We are still working on
measuring the spot position before moving it.
LASTI (Mittleman)
- We vented Lasti on
Sunday night in order to fix the controls prototype, do some calibration work on HAM-SAS and make some
changes in the pondermotive experiment.
- Brett has found the source of the problems in
the quad. He found that one OSEM
flag had broken off and one stop had been shaken by the uncontrolled oscillation enough so that it
came in contact with t he mass.
There is an entry in the Lasti ilog at http://emvogil-3.mit.edu/ilog/pub/ilog.cgi?
group=lasti&task=view&date_to_view=05/14/2007&anchor_to_scroll_to=2007:05:14:09:38:10-brett
that explains how the failure occurred. and hopefully another appearing in the near future describing the repairs.
- The pondermotive team
has changed their cavity arm lengths (see http://emvogil-3.mit.edu/ilog/pub/ilog.cgi and http://emvogil-3.mit.edu/ilog/pub/ilog.cgi
for further explanations) to remove
an unintended degeneracy.
- Alberto has been calibrating the SAS actuators
and sensors.
- We should get the BSC and the mid-HAM closed
this week, we are not sure about
the end HAM, it might have to wait until Tuesday.
- The scaffolding for the ISI-Test stand has
arrived we did a quick fit check
and will now clean it before fully assembling.
CIT
Science Group (Weinstein)
Many group members are at the LSC meeting in
Italy.
OPEN SCIENCE GRID APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT
- Checked operability on FERMIGRID after
encountered problem (successful)
- Attempted to use Pegasus vds-plan,
vds-run rather than gencdag, condor_submit_dag with the aim to
conduct depth- first analysis on
LIGO WF (failed due to missing mysql and perl dbi at CIT, problem
will be solved with the Pegasus 2.0 release)
- Attempted to run small WF WITH dynamic cleanup
on OSG sites (failed if the remote
site had not updated vds version to 1.48)
- Generated WorkFlows of
different sizes and run them successfully on ldas-grid (local cluster)
- Wrote agenda and minutes for weekly LIGO-Pegasus
teleconference
- Attend weekly LIGO-Pegasus and DASWG teleconferences
- Had cert DN added to PSU and UWMilwaukee
RLS grid-mapfiles with the aim to use local ht data rather than the staged
data when running at those sites
(this resulted in problems when running on OSG sites)
- Currently troubleshooting: failing jobs on OSG
sites after being added to PSU and
UWM RLS grid-mapfiles. This has been traced to
Pegasus assuming that if you are in the
RLS, you are in the RLI grid-mapfile as well. This is not generally true in the
LSC.
OPEN SCIENCE GRID INTEGRATION TESTBED
- With D. Meyers' departure, have been going
through and doing a security audit
on the ITB cluster. This has resulted in the change of root passwords, removal of several accounts,
changes to the grid-mapfiles, some security patches being installed. D.
Meyers' replacement will begin in
mid-June.
- Discovered that the new pegasus option "--nocleanup"
is resulting in the workflows not
cleaning up at the end and resulted in the disk space on the ITB gatekeeper filling up. This has now been
cleaned up and we are aware that the new pegasus has this feature.
Note: this is a transitory problem that is
associated with the new pegasus client side software requiring server side
features that will not be available
until the next OSG software stack release.
OPEN SCIENCE GRID MANAGEMENT
- It has become necessary to act as the OSG-ITB
system administrator until new hire
comes on board.
- Attended teleconference with OSG Project
Associate located at Fermilab to work on
year two planning for the OSG and for the Caltech milestones for the subaward.
- Held follow-up telecon
with the OSG Executive on the subject of Caltech and LIGO year two planning.
- Attended OSG Executive Team telecon
and reported on resource issues.
- The upcoming OSG Newsletter has an article
congratulating all the sites that
supported the recent push for Engagement compute cycles and assisting with the configuration and set up for these jobs. The LSC's
OSG production site at UWM made the top ten contributors to this effort in
the newsletter.
- MIT is in the process of configuring an OSG
gatekeeper head node on its cluster
to be added to the OSG production grid.
- h(t) generation: following up on dags that fail multiple times and other job
babysitting
- more work on cosmic string lensing
and microlensing
Laboratory
Computing (Anderson)
- (ML) diskcacheAPI - updated to
include signal handler to catch sigterm coming
from threads so diskcache would not terminated
by itself. Updated writeDirCache process to be
executed from bgLoop with delay betweens writes
controlled by diskcache resource. Added logging
to report the actual secs delay between writes
of cache to disk.
- (ML) managerAPI - updated manager bootstrapAPI code to not reboot API if resource flag
is set to not reboot. Also allowed manager to reboot if it is startup and
then enable the no reboot flag is set by user.
- (ML) genericAPI - cvs phil's
changes to bgLoop to support a noop state incase caller desires to temporarily
suspend loop execution.
- (ML) Testing: - No system test was performed as code is
unstable.
- rsync builds from dev to test and run in parallel with dev. test does
not have diskcache reboots at all; a sigterm is caught, job rate is much slower 300
jobs/hr.
- looking into dmt mismatch parent key errors on
dev and test and working out a better test script to synchronise
the dmt jobs so they dont
get out of sync. Due to a different job flow from diskcache
having a large set of mount points, the dmt
jobs are mostly queued and not submitted for each round and so tend to
get out of order resulting in invalid parent key.
LDAS System Administration (Anderson)
Caltech
(Phil Ehrens)
- Worked on processing and output parts of MOU Webform project. Wrote simple interface for editing
text files via browser and updating them on the server (without
compromising the security model). Currently working on output (pdf) generation interface.
(Erik Espinoza)
- Built LIGO condor rpm, wrote documentation for
condor rpm.
- Tested condor rpm on frog and then deployed on
node321-node331.
- Checked ServerTech
firmware version.
- Deployed Berkeley DB libs
and perl libs for
Virgo acct on gateway.
- Notified Larry about DHCP misconfiguration.
- Configured condor_preen
to run hourly.
- Replaced disk on node241.
- More post-config on Ubuntu test box.
- Found E@H job count problem.
MIT
(Fred Donovan)
- Added second disk to ldas-condor.mit.edu;
install FC4, postgres, etc.
- Moved neg. coll.; will stop/restart daemons to
effect change tonight (hopefully).
Livingston
(Igor Yakushin)
- There were two-three more unexplained crashes of
gateway and dataserver. A case with SUN is
opened and all the relevant information, including the core dumps, was
submitted.
(Dwayne Giardina)
- Tape eject for shipment to CIT.
- Tape storage eject.
- Replaced two power strips for the nodes with the
new custom-built strips. looks
good and appears to be working fine. will
probably replace the rest next week.
- Restarted Disk2Disk yesterday after gateway
crashed.
Hanford
(Greg Mendell)
- All RDS and trend data was up-to-date at LHO,
LLO, and CIT as of Tue. May 22, 2007. Yesterday there were a few rls errors that caused a few files to fail to
transfer. I am working to make sure all the data has successfully
transferred to the sites and CIT. A new option was added to GapCheckCompareAndReport to print of list of missings, as well as the segments, and a minor bug in
removing missing files from rls was fixed.
These changes have been checked into CVS here:
CVS/Root=:pserver:anonymous@gravity.phys.uwm.edu:2402/usr/local/cvs/lscsoft
CVS/Repository=dsorun/contrib/gapchecker
General
Computing (Wallace)
MIT
(Fred)
- Installed 'pure-pop' webmail
interface, in addition to squirrelmail: nocc (php). Webmail server is ligomail.mit.edu, zone on pellinore.
- LASTI network security brief.
- few laptop issues
- Integrated LDAP with ligo-burst
cluster; to integrate nova/gravity and ligo-burst;
solaris10 client - openldap
ok (w/o tls) re:lancelot
integration.
- some purchasing/licensing.
Livingston
(Shannon)
- Installed a server in the CUR.
- Performed some troubleshooting on NS1. The disk
has been transferred to another
system since the problems seem to be hardware related. The system may be still covered under warranty.
- Installed yet more patches on several Sun
systems.
- Ordered various supplies for GC & users.
- Worked on documentation with Kent.
- Usual rounds of IDS logs, etc.
- Updated vlan
configuration on two switches.
(Dwayne)
- Locked a couple of NIS+ accounts.
- Received GC account request form a SURF student,
going to send email to the others
asking them to complete the process.
- Created new image for SEC laptops and installed
on all 6 machines.
- Configuration changes for dns
resolution on cleveland.
- Security updates and reboot on kantech security server.
- Card readers at ISCT4 and PSL table had been
locked up since our last power
glitch. Various troubleshooting was unsuccessful until Danny discovered a fix and now all is well.
- Applied security updates to various Windows
machines.
- Usual user support requests.
- Cleared spam trap
LLO mail summary for 17 May 2007 - 24 May
2007:
Rejected: 6,553(412 containing virus)
Accepted: 4,235
Total: 10,788
Hanford
(Christine)
- As part of moving user files to the new disk
system and in preparation for the
start of a new SURF summer; I moved the past year's SURF student files to a central directory which is accessible
from the web. Because some of
the SURF students' files contain LIGO data, the web access is password protected.
- The majority of my time this week has been spent
moving user files to the new disk
system. I have divided the user directories over the two disk partitions based on size of the home
directory. Those user's whose home directories are 2 Gb
and greater are on one disk partition and will have disk quotas imposed. Those user's
with home directories less than 2 Gb will be on the the other partition and will not (for now) have
quotas.
- ESnet has asked me to create a diagram of all the
hardware between LHO and ESnet, Seattle for both the primary network circuit
and the backup. This is to help
them with the configuration of the BGP peering. ESnet
would like to get BGP setup first and then
test the backup network in the
process. I've scheduled time with ESnet
for June 5th, to work on the BGP
configuration.
CIT
(Mike)
- This week I worked on SolidWorks
trying to get an additional plugin named “COSMOS” to run on server 2003
“Deneb.” This is to allow users to
log on remotely to run COSMOS. This
software did not work due to hardware
and networking issues. We are in the process of upgrading this server, for now deneb is off line. For a temporary solution I
setup a new workstation loaded SolidWorks 2007 SP3.1 + COSMOS to replace Deneb until we
get this server upgraded and back in service. I setup this workstation for a user in his cubicle using a
KVM switch.
- Work with new users getting them setup with SolidWorks and access to the PDMWORKS vault.
- Look into some DHCP issues on hamal which is servicing the 114 subnet. The leases were having some problems. I ended up
deleting this subnet and started
over. Things seem to be running okay for now.
- Other user support plus sysadmin
tasks.
(Bruce Sears, 0.5 days)
- General iLog
maintenance and issue handling.
(Veronica)
- LIGO: Website updates for PAC and NSF
Review meetings. Continued work
on a DVD for LASTI installation. High-resolution images for a
publisher. LIGO web updates and user
support.
- LSC: Updates of the database of technical
papers. Ongoing updates of the
database of LSC-VIRGO meeting presentations. Set up a page for ExComm election. Other misc. website updates.
(Christian)
- Working on installing new wsus
client on all LIGO Windows system.
- Stocked printer cartridges that were delivered
to LIGO this week.
- Phil Lindquist- Upgraded Adobe acrobat
professional from version
6.0 to 7 on Philıs laptop.
- Other misc.: Continued onsite software/phone
support.
(Larry)
- Continual work on purchasing related items.
Cleared up a P-card issue. Ordered workstation for the 40M and memory
upgrades for a couple of the
engineering workstations. Ordered a
couple of small s/w pkgs. for different people. Resolved paperwork on the Mac workstation
purchased for the E2E group.
- Still working with the PMA and construction
people on the different room rehabs
taking place. In the next week or so(no set date yet) we will have to turn off the
chilled water for the computer room. The
work around we had planned will not
work and we have to go back to the original plan. There will be a couple
of portable units in the room so we should not have to shutdown any
equipment. Cleared up some cabling
issues in the sub-basement labs. Hopefully, that part of the project will get back on track.
- Fixed a couple of problems on the mailman
server. Most were typos but one
needed a modification in the configuration.
- Took care of a number of account issues.
- Assisted Mike on troubleshooting a couple of
different projects he is working
on.
- Cleaned up a few problems on the new home
directories for different users
that had some minor issues. Most were stale nfs
handles.
- Misc. support items for different users.
Advanced LIGO and
Supporting R&D (Shoemaker)
No Report
For additional information about this
report, contact Albert Lazzarini or Phil Lindquist