STAR NEWSLETTER NUMBER 28

1. From the spokesman:

Reported by John Harris

I am back from a productive six months sabbatical in Europe, as most of you are aware. I wish to thank Tim Hallman for his hard work and success as STAR Interim Spokesman while I was away.

The recent collaboration meeting at Rice was quite successful. I wish to thank Billy Bonner for hosting the meeting. I also wish to thank Wayne Robinson and, as always, Liz Mogavero for their help in organizing the meeting. Without their efforts we couldn't have succeeded. I also wish to let people know officially that the next STAR Collaboration Meeting will be held at Brookhaven the week of August 11.

It is time for elections of Junior members to the STAR Council. I have asked Bill Christie, a Jr. Council member who is leaving the Council since he has officially outgrown the distinction of being junior, to arrange for elections. Please see the section of this Newsletter titled ELECTION OF NEW JUNIOR MEMBER REPRESENTATIVES for details of the election criteria and process.

A few news items follow:

1. Jay Marx, Tim Hallman, Lee Schroeder and I accompanied a Penn State contingent of Steve Heppelman and Dave Shirley, Vice President for Research at Penn State, to the National Science Foundation to discuss possible ways of gaining funding for an EMC endcap from NSF. This is an independent discussion from the discussions that have been ongoing with DOE for the EMC. We received encouragement and some good advice on how to continue our approach.

2. Tim, Jay, Lee Schroeder, Tom Cormier and I had discussions with Tom Ludlam at the Collaboration Meeting on getting the STAR EMC barrel funding started this year. These discussions were started with DOE last Fall by Tim and Jay. Tim, Jay and I visited the DOE after the Collaboration Meeting and now RHIC and the DOE are discussing the possibility of planning to fund the EMC for STAR for some capability for Day 1 data acquisition. In the meantime, Jay has appointed Tom Cormier the STAR EMC Project Leader and Tom has appointed Dave Underwood as the EMC Technical Leader.

3. Jay has also appointed Volker Eckardt, of MPI-Munich, as the STAR Forward (formerly external) TPC Project Leader.

2. STAR Project Summary

Excerpt from the STAR Monthly Report - December, 1995

The re-planning exercise that was discussed in the November report was 80% complete by the end of December. All that remains is to finalize some details, disseminate the plan and respond to feedback. The plan will enable the STAR project to complete construction in June 1999 while staying within the RHIC funding limitations in FY96 and FY97. The plan does identify a shortfall of funding in FY98 on the order of a couple million dollars. Because of the stretch-out and the need to carry key members of the construction team for additional periods of time, the plan also results in an overall increase in the project cost to complete, again on the order of a couple million dollars.

The STAR assembly building construction progress slowed dramatically because of the holidays and ongoing problems with the general contractor (GC). The situation does not look particularly good for meeting the scheduled completion date of early February. Meetings are scheduled with the GC, the bonding agent and BNL Plant Engineering to attempt to work things out. The underlying threat that the GC will default on the contract is increasingly likely. STAR Management will keep a close eye on the situation.

TPC Summary and Highlights

Magnet Summary and Highlights

Electronics Summary and Highlights

The DAQ group spent much of December preparing a series of budget scenarios in an attempt to accommodate the challenging funding profile with which STAR is confronted. The hand-populated temporary receiver card [ROSIE, Rev. B] has been tested, and found to work without problems. Fabrication of the remaining ten boards has started, and they should be complete by the end of January. No visible progress has been made in the negotiations with the ASIC vendor. Preparations were made for a DAQ Software Workshop to be held at Rice immediately following the collaboration meeting.

The Trigger group spent most of December investigating various funding scenarios, with each iteration affecting many STAR engineers. Time was also devoted to organizing for the level 3 (L3) portion of the trigger workshop.

In Slow Controls, further developments were made to the Operator Interface for the System Test. The EPICS screen developed for the monitoring of the TPC Readout Board was modified to incorporate suggestions from TPC working group members at LNBL. The installation of the HDLC link at Creighton is continuing.

Computing Summary and Highlights

The following contribution was submitted by Doug Olson, LBNL

Excerpt from the CERN Computing Newsletter, 221

(http://wwwcn1.cern.ch/cnls/221/index.html

CERNLIB Support for Windows/NT

CERN Program Library Office CN/ASD

Introduction

The importance of commodity computing for HEP experiments, particularly for the LHC era, is becoming increasingly widely accepted. A number of proposals have been made to investigate the suitability of Windows/NT and evaluate its potential role in HEP computing. Consequently, we plan that Windows/NT, initially for Intel hardware and the Microsoft Fortran Powerstation V4 compiler, will become a fully supported CERNLIB platform by the end of 1996.

Satoshi Ozaki, the RHIC project head, held a RHIC project wide staff meeting on January 19th. The agenda had updates from Mike Harrison and Tom Ludlam on the status of the RHIC collider and detector efforts, respectively, and a presentation by Dr. Ozaki on a reorganization plan for the RHIC project. Some of the details of the reorganization plan are still being worked on. The new organization charts will be available on February 1st. The new plan removes some of the organizational structures which artificially separate various parts of the project into divisions, and replacing this with a number of groups. The new plan also has what was the magnet division moving under Mike Harrison's sphere of responsibility as head of the collider effort. This movement of the magnet division was triggered by the departure from the lab of Art Greene, the head of the present magnet division, and the ramping down of the RHIC magnet production as that effort nears completion. Dr. Ozaki explained that while the former organization, with separate divisions, was appropriate for the project while the various pieces of RHIC were being designed and built, the new organization, with many groups under one umbrella, will facilitate the integration of all of these pieces into the RHIC collider. The movement of the former magnet division personnel to the collider effort also starts the effort of RHIC management to place and retain as many of the technical staff as constructively possible, and apply their expertise to the installation and commissioning of the RHIC collider and detectors.

In late December the entire RHIC Helium production system was brought back to life for the first time since the initial acceptance tests in the mid nineteen eighties. From what I've been able to gather the effort was a success. I'll report more specifics on this test and system when the results are written up.

ELECTION OF NEW JUNIOR MEMBER REPRESENTATIVES

It is time once again to hold elections to select three representatives to the STAR Council to represent the junior members of STAR. Please see the STAR bylaws on the WWW (STAR -> STAR Management -> Bylaws) to see the official discussion of membership on the STAR Council. John has asked me, as one of the present junior representatives, to conduct these elections.

The procedure I plan to follow is:

1. Determine who the junior members are: All members of the STAR collaboration who are less than 5 years past their Ph.D BY THE TIME OF THE ELECTION are defined to be junior members and hence eligible for the election. If all goes well the election ought to be completed by sometime in April. If you qualify as a junior member I'd like you to send me an E-mail (christie@bnl.gov) so that I can tabulate a list of the junior members.

2. Call for nominations: I'll wait until February 23rd to collect a list of the junior members. On that date I'll send out a call for nominations to the junior member list that I tabulated in step one. Any junior member may nominate any other junior member. Self nominations are also allowed and encouraged. Junior members who have held this position in the past are eligible as long as they still satisfy the requirements to be a junior member.

3. On March 15th I'll close the nominating process: At this time I'll request a SHORT statement from all of the nominees for inclusion on the ballot. At this stage I can hound the nominees and hopefully get all of the statements within a week.

4. Call for the vote: I'll send out the ballot on or about March 22nd. I'll collect votes via E-mail until April 8th. At this point I'll count up the votes and declare the winners. N.B. The winners will be the three nominees with the most votes (if at least one of these 3 is a graduate student), or the two non-graduate students with the most votes and the graduate student with the most votes.

6. Comings and goings at STAR

• Bruce Moskowitz joined the STAR group at BNL to work on infrastructure software.
• John Sterling, formerly part of project management at LBL, has left the STAR Project.

7. Employment opportunities

Hans-Georg Ritter, the leader of the Relativistic Nuclear Collisions group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, informed me that he anticipates a Post-Doc position becoming available soon. The position would entail at least half time effort on one of the LBNL projects in STAR. If further information is desired before the formal announcement of the position please contact Hans-Georg (ritter@lbl.gov).