Reported by JOHN HARRIS
It's been another busy year for STAR and we've again accomplished a great deal. Even though we still have quite a ways to go before STAR is in operation and we get our first look at RHIC events, we have had a good start. It seems that things never slow down. We continually push ourselves and are being pushed by new developments in technology. So at this time of the year I recommend that we take some time to reflect upon accomplishments of the past year and potential changes for the upcoming year and relax a little. I would like to congratulate and thank everyone in STAR for making STAR a success. I wish you a relaxing and peaceful Holiday season and look foward to another productive year. See you at the Collaboration Meeting at the end of January.
The STAR rebaselining effort was revitalized this month. It is planned that STAR will complete a cost and schedule rebaseline within the next several months that will reflect a March 1999 completion.
There were two internal subsystem reviews in October: a conceptual design review (CDR) of the STAR Slow Controls effort, and an update of the status of the integration effort. Both reviews were fruitful; many good suggestions were made and we learned that both activities are on track.
An external review of the technical feasibility of the STAR Silicon Vertex Tracker (SVT) was called by Tom Ludlam and held at the end of October. This review went very well. The committee concluded that the design is indeed feasible and that no significant changes in the planned course are necessary.
The committee reports were finalized and distributed this month for the Magnet and FEE PDRs, and for the TPC Sector FDR. Action items for these reviews were entered into the database and distributed to the subsystem managers for action.
The outer field cage (OFC) 3-cm gap gas insulator prototype has achieved a breakdown voltage of 79 to 80 kV in dry nitrogen. This is about 90 percent of the Paschen limit. This improvement over earlier results came because a sag in the inner tube was corrected by rotating it 150 degrees.
The sector prototype has been shipped to Purdue for testing. The sector design has been modified to address problems identified during construction and testing of the prototype.
The project management of the TPC has been transferred from Roger Stone to Russ Wells due to Roger's retirement on October 31.
MiniDAQ software development is essentially complete. Further progress requires delivery of hardware (readout board and VME TAXI board). Specifications for the ASIC which will play a role in zero-suppression on both the TPC and SVT have been through several iterations. The DAQ workshop which will take place at LBL in November is generating enthusiastic response. Approximately 30 people will attend.
In the trigger group, two major issues were dealt with his month. The first was to move all trigger software into the TAS system to make it compatible with the rest of STAR. The second was to move the level 0 electronics into the cave. Work on the trigger system is continuing in preparation for a PDR in March or April of 1994. Discussions on the interfaces between the Level 0 and Level 1 triggers are in progress to determine data rates, location of equipment, and implementation approaches. Progress is also being made on other fronts, including the Xilinx information processing, the TRIG-DAQ interface, and level 1 processors.
The STAR Controls Conceptual Design Review was held on October 18. Twenty Action Items have been received and are being addressed.
Activity in software management tools consisted of transferring the database for STAR condition values from it's initial location at LBL to BNL. The resource-weighted schedule for software infrastructure was iterated in October and is nearly complete.
Preparations continued for an expert workshop to be held at LBL in early November. The sim and ana directories now contain approximately 100,000 lines of code (not including outside software). Four new packages (vpm, vpv, tpn and rmt) were defined.
A new package TCL has been installed to perform cluster finding on pixel data. Responsibilities for the slow simulator have been reassigned in light of a change of personnel at LBL.
Reported by MATT BLOOMER
The simulation workshop took place 29 November through 3 December and was attended by 22 people from nine STAR institiutions. See the page in the WWW under STAR -- STAR Workshops -- 29Nov93 for details. Facilities provided included analysed data in "DST" form both as TAS table files and as PAW Ntuple (HBOOK) files. Some of the attendees were beginners who became aquainted with STAR software for the first time. Some were experts who continued work on installing analysis modules. The week was designed as a a starting point for simulation efforts that will continue with a target of definitive results for the collaboration meeting.
Reported by HANK CRAWFORD
The recent STAR trigger workshop at BNL dealt with interface issues, the upcoming collaboration meeting, and preparation for our preliminary design review in March 1994. Detailed notes are available on the world wide web. The interface discussed included connections to detector subsystems which consist of a simple 6 wire system which covers the busy/livetime connections, the RHIC clock, and special trigger connections so that each detector system can request that a specific crossing or calibration event be kept. The DAQ interface has evolved to a very simple design in which the trigger controller informs DAQ that an interesting event is in the pipe within a few hundred microseconds of the interaction. The discussion of slow control server functions identified three classes of server information that we will make available, including system configuration, run conditions, and trigger status.
Half of the meeting was devoted to the status of our simulation software and plans for the upcoming collaboration meeting. All of the trigger code is now in TAS and beautifully documented in the world wide web format on rsgi00. We plan presentation on the physics topics used in our trigger analysis, on the selectivity of our level 0,1, and 2 algorithms, and on the status of our level 3 ideas. Much of this simulation effort will form the heart of our physics overview and design criteria for our upcoming PDR.
Reported by DAVE UNDERWOOD
We know of two people with a few years Post-Doc experience who were working primarily on SDC and will be available soon. One of them, Fred Luehring at Indiana, has experience with data acquisition with PDP11, VAX, CAMAC, etc. and with managing the computer system for an experiment and with Monte-Carloing a straw tube tracking detector. The other, P.K. Job at Argonne is very experienced with GEANT, EGS, Hadron shower codes, and studies of radiation damage on detector response. There are also two graduate students at ITEP, Moscow who are interested in working on operating experiments.