STAR NEWSLETTER NUMBER 23

1. From the spokesman:

Reported by TIM HALLMAN

A major event this month was the 11th STAR Collaboration Meeting, at which there were 130 participants--a new record. I would like to thank all who participated. Despite the busy schedule, much progress was made, particularly in the working groups.

One of the highlights of the meeting was a discussion of the STAR spin physics program. I am hopeful that for people not so familiar with this aspect of STAR, the meeting served to provide some introduction which will naturally lead to further investigation of this fundamental study of the spin structure of the proton. Many thanks to George Sterman and Steve Heppelmann for helping to lead these discussions during the meeting.

An important observation made at the STAR Council Meeting is that there are still many jobs in the STAR construction project for which manpower is urgently needed from within the Collaboration. I have polled the STAR Projects leaders, and am compiling a list of the most urgent needs for distribution to the STAR Council. A clear priority in the coming months will be to communicate with the Council members and others in STAR to find the necessary manpower to meet these needs.

A further priority will be to move ahead, budget permitting, with progress toward construction of the STAR Additional Equipment. The presentation of these projects at the meeting showed significant progress in all areas, although the varying stages of preparedness for a construction readiness review. The goal in the coming months will be to insure continued progress, so that as the budget permits, STAR can add these additions to the baseline construction project as soon as possible.

Finally, I would like to thank all who helped with arranging the meeting, and in particular Liz Mogavero and Bill Christie who were instrumental in seeing that the meeting ran smoothly.

Excerpt from the STAR Monthly Report - July, 1995

The mechanical integration effort for July continued focusing on detailed interfaces between subsystems. Requests were sent to subsystem managers for items to be placed on emergency and uninterruptible power. A preliminary list has been created. The subsystem managers have approved the assignment of rack space on the platform.

Conventional Systems work in July revolved around setting the design requirements for the platforms. Design of the modified chilled water system is currently under review to ensure that STAR's requirements will be met.

TPC Summary and Highlights

Half of the 40' copper/Kapton flex circuit board strips for the OFC have been exposed. Equipment needed to cut the strips to width will arrive soon.

Verification by finite element analysis of the IFC design using 0.00035-inch double-sided aluminum with 0.003-inch Kapton is continuing.

All outer sectors have been completed or are being assembled. The first inner sector pad plane is due from BMC on August 1. All inner sector backers have been rough machined.

A second meeting with STADCO, the fabricator of the wheel was held on July 10. Several "no cost" changes to the drawings were agreed to and implemented.

The selection of prism angles and adjustment ranges have been determined. Bench tests have confirmed the calculated adjustment sensitivity for the selected combination of prism apex angles and offset.

Magnet Summary and Highlights

Electronics Summary and Highlights

Activity during July focused on preparations for the Preliminary Design Review which took place July 27-28 at LBNL. Preparations included a software/electronics workshop at Rice July 9-11. One result of the PDR was to point out that DAQ has a manpower crisis in both engineering and software. Work on ROSIE, the temporary receiver card, continued. At the end of July, the debugging of the hardware was still in progress. The ASIC design process is ongoing. A PDR is scheduled for the end of August, at which time the foundry-independent design will be reviewed in detail using VHDL behavioral models.

In trigger hardware, all tests on the DSM prototype have been completed including the timing tests that began in June. In trigger software, the complete MODSIM package is operating. The group is looking at various latencies as they affect the data flow, and expects to couple this to the DAQ MODSIM soon.

A Slow Controls workstation was set up at LBNL for the systems test. Becky Burke gave an introduction to Epics to the trigger group at LBNL. Online documents and hardware controls status were presented by Mike Cherney at the Electronics Reviews at Rice and LBNL. Jeff Gross was awarded a Master of Science degree by Creighton University. His thesis is titled "Development of a Distributed Control System for The Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC (STAR)."

Computing Summary and Highlights

Drafts of the offline detector simulation and event reconstruction software functional model and requirements document were finished and presented to the Star Electronics and Software review panel at LBNL. Documentation was completed for the new NA49-like implementation of Geant for STAR, "GSTAR." A pad monitor and graphics display for the TPC system test was developed. New data structures were defined for TPC track segments corresponding to the new, more modular structure for the TPC tracking code that was developed at the recent TPC tracking workshop.

The software design and on-line software efforts were dedicated entirely to preparing for the STAR Electronics and Software Review. The code library was moved to the AFS file system. About 50 STAR user acounts were set up for this purpose. The analysis shell effort involved preparations for collaboration meeting presentations and additional work on the new version of the analysis shell.

The following contribution was submitted by Doug Olson, LBNL

I thought it would be useful to include an interesting fact about STAR computing each month in the newsletter. I think that the general level of awareness and understanding of the computing problem for STAR could be elevated a bit with this.

An interesting fact about STAR computing:

STAR will generate nearly 1 petabyte (PB) of data per year. How much is 1 PB?

• 1 PB = 126 miles of shelf space for 12" 9-track tapes.
• 1 PB = 2.6 mile high stack of 8mm tapes (4.5 GB ea.).
• 1 PB = 2.5 million tons of paper, if printed.

4. Notice of Meetings:

August has been a busy month here at Brookhaven. The 11th STAR collaboration meeting was held at Brookhaven the week of August 7th. This was the largest collaboration gathering to date with about 130 collaborators in attendance. We've just finished gathering and formatting the minutes from the plenary sessions and making the copies of the plenary session transparencies. A set of these minutes and transparency copies is on the way to each of the institutions in STAR. I'd like to thank all those who supplied us with minutes from the plenary sessions as well as the various working group sessions.

As elucidated by Dr. Ozaki in his presentation to the STAR collaboration, and witnessed by those of you that attended the tours of the RHIC accelerator, the RHIC project is progressing very well. The erection of the structural steel for the STAR assembly building got started the week after the STAR meeting. All of the main vertical supports for this 60 ft high building are now in place, as well as the supports for the assembly building crane, some of the horizontal roof trusses, some of the cross braces, and the framing of the rooms on the East side of the building. One can now look at the site and get a very good feeling for the size of the various areas and how the assembly of STAR will be done.

Many of you have probably heard about the wild fires that we've had here on Long Island in the last few weeks. The Brookhaven Laboratory site was not hit by these fires. The Rocky Pt. fire was about 6 miles to the North West of the lab, and the Hamptons fire was about 10 -> 15 miles or so to the South East. I heard on the radio this morning that the current dry spell here on the island (~25 days with no rain) is the longest for the New York area since just after the Civil war.

7. Employment opportunities

          Postdoctoral Research Associate Position in
       Experimental Ultra-Relativistic Heavy Ion Physics
  
                Nuclear Physics Laboratory
                 University of Washington
                 Seattle, Washington, USA

         http://mist.npl.washington.edu/home.html

Applications and recommendations should be sent to:

         	Professor John G. Cramer, 
		Nuclear Physics Laboratory GL-10,
         	University of Washington, 
		Seattle, WA  98195, USA.