2. STAR Project Summary
Excerpted from the STAR Monthly Report for May 1997.
Project Management Summary and Highlights
The seismic anchors were installed and a final check of the return steel alignment was completed prior to beginning coil installation! By month end, 6 of the 12 coils were in - the remaining coils will be brought into the Assembly Building, tested and installed in June.Preliminary drawings of the water & gas piping and low voltage power and signal cable trays on the magnet end rings have been completed and are being reviewed. A second review of the vendor's platform design efforts was held at BNL this month. A 3rd review will occur in June. It is hoped/expected that this will be the final review so WA Schmidt can begin fabrication. Assembly of the platforms is still planned at the 6 o'clock hall for August.
The Magnet Pole Tip Trim Coil fabrication contract was awarded to Everson Electric this month. The coils will be delivered late in the calendar year. The Pole Tip Support (Carriage) design has been reviewed and the drawings signed. The procurement process will begin in June. These represent the last of the major procurements for the Magnet System.
The next STAR Collaboration Meeting will be at BNL the week of July 21.
A Collaboration review of the Trigger system was held in May. The purpose of the review was to assess the necessary scope of the Trigger detectors for doing day 1 physics and beyond. There will be a committee report in June. A decision on the final baseline trigger scope will be made by June 13th.
TPC Summary and Highlights
Installation of laser rafts and covers has proceeded at a good pace during May. Production of the covers has more than kept pace with installation. All of the rafts and covers have been installed on the east side of the TPC. The gas system has been tested extensively. Software modifications and improvements have been made. Work on the IFC has been paced by technician availability. The patches of unbonded skin have been repaired but the final electrical tests are still pending. The Sector Mounting Tool (SMT) has been completed for the outer sectors as has the various components needed to "clock" the sector to match the wheel apertures.
Magnet Summary and Highlights
The Pole Tip Trim Coil contract was awarded to Everson Electric for delivery of two trim coils before the end of the calendar year. Design of the Pole Tip Support Carriage was completed with procurement to begin in early June. Design continues on areas of the water cooled power buss and coil interconnections. Delivery, via truck, of the first pole tip continues to be a problem. At issue is obtaining the required permits.
Electronics Summary and Highlights
Systems Test
In May, the system test reached a full sector in size. This complete sector is being read out through 181 FEE cards, 6 readout boards and six Rosie boards on 3 cyclone processors. In addition, considerable effort went into tracking down a variety of minor problems to get the hardware and software to work reliably. At the end of May, a weekend long, 30,000 event cosmic ray test was done. This data is currently being analyzed. FEE stability tests are also being run.8 CTB slats arrived at Berkeley for the cosmic ray test. They included scintillator, PMT's and a high voltage generator, but no processing electronics.
Most of the required infrastructure (gas, power, networking, etc.) for the cosmic ray test is now in place in Building 77. The FEE hardware should be moved there in June with the cosmic ray test beginning in July.
Front End Electronics (FEE)
All SAS and almost all SCA custom chips for the 96% build have arrived back from Orbit. They will be shipped off for packaging shortly. We have also ordered the FEE card PC boards.Two chip testers were sent to Brookhaven and SCA testing has started. About 1500 SCA and 700 SAS chips will need to be tested per month to keep up with the schedule.
The boards and parts will be shipped to Munich in June at which point assembly will begin with the hope of producing 200 boards a week.
Significant work went into getting six readout boards with their extenders operational for the cosmic ray tests.
The system test has also been used to study electronics stability. A possible pedestal drift has been identified on the first event when the sits for a long period.
Mass production of the power supply chassis has started. Safety approval is also being sought for the cables desired for the clock and trigger distribution; this is taking a long time and may impact our cost or schedule if delays continue for too long. An FEE design review is being planned for late June or early July.
Data Acquisition (DAQ)
Debugging of the SUNNY (prototype mezzanine) board is nearly complete. Design decisions for the next mezzanine (SUNNY2) are in progress.A test version of the high-speed data path has been fabricated and is under test. A change from the temporary receiver card is a switch to a new HP G-link part which is completely TTL, reducing the parts count and the need for an on-board negative voltage regulator.
Evaluation of a commercial SCI/PCI bridge is in progress at BNL and Austin. This set of measurements will terminate in July.
Trigger
In trigger software, a series of simulations were completed concerning the beam pipe and year-one running. These were performed in preparation for the various run-time and trigger meetings in May. In addition, the MWS code for the MWC simulation interpretation was checked and verified for operation in STAF.Effort on the MWC electronics continues, with no conclusion yet. The CTB hardware for the controller board is being prototyped.
Slow Controls
The VME crate "starhdlc" which houses VME HDLC interface; the Sun workstation "starslow" which will serve as the central controls OPI for the cosmic ray test; and the VME crate "starcat" and associated hardware for the monitoring and control of the TPC electron drift velocity were all installed in building 77A this month.Both the EPICS software and the vxWorks operating system were installed on the Sun workstation "nsdsst" in the system test room. This workstation now acts as the operator interface to the "starvme" Input Output Controller. This will allow tests of the readout board to continue in parallel to preparations for the cosmic ray test.
Several EPICS databases and GUIs were modified to facilitate testing of several TPC readout boards. Presently 6 readout boards are in place in test room and debugging over the HDLC link is in progress. Also, the EPICS GUI for the anode high voltage has been rebuilt using the Motif version of the Editor and Display Manager (MEDM).
Computing Summary and Highlights
Simulations
Major updates to GSTAR geometry and g2t were performed in the following geometry files: tpcegeo (TPC/MWC Geometry), ecalgeo (EEMC Geometry), ftpcgeo (FTPC Geometry), and svttgeo (SVT Geometry). Also an SL96b release of the present GSTAR and g2t is in progress and will be completed in early June.Deviations between the simulated TPC dE/dx vs p curves and the expected Bethe-Bloch dependences where shown to not arise from the agi/gstar/g2t parts of the chain. The most likely cause is now thought to be related to how /sim/tfs treats merged hits. Work on this is in progress.
The relatively poor MWC response in recent simulations was traced to relatively simple software problems in the /sim/mws package.
Marguerite Belt Tonjes from MSU-NSCL, and Akio Ogawa at BNL via PSU, have joined the group and are participating in EMC-related efforts.
Analysis Software
Two new analysis packages (MFT and TSC) were created and added to the software library. MFT (Magnetic Field Translation) is for translating the STAR magnetic field measurements into interpolated values for analysis modules. TSC (TPC Slow Controls) is for unpacking TPC slow controls data for monitoring and calibrations.The TPC calibration and analysis software package TFC was modified to include additional cuts on the time bucket number and ADC values in transforming from the raw data to the pixel table. Also the source code for generating the 10-to-8 bit conversion table was installed. New kumacs for running the modules were written and installed as well. The package was updated on sun4os5 and irix.
The TPC Pad Monitor was modified and installed in the ~staronl/Staf area for sun4os5. The data selection function was made robust and a virtual color map is now used for better display characteristics.
Recent cosmic ray data for a full TPC sector was used to develop and demonstrate the capabilities of a full TPC reconstruction chain including pad response, pixel generation, cluster finding, hit reconstruction and tracking. Many events were analyzed and plots are available from the System Test people. This represents the achievement of a major milestone in STAR baseline analysis software.
Multiple event loop testing of the fast simulation/reconstruction chain in STAF (formerly the BFC in TAS) progressed with verification of the SVT and TPC fast simulation and tracking parts of the chain.
Software Infrastructure
A new release of the system branch of the STAR software library was prepared and installed as the development (dev) version. This same version will be tagged and installed as the SL97a release.A first RHIC common off-line software STAF tutorial workshop was held at BNL on May 19 & 20 with attendance by PHENIX collaborators as well as STAR collaborators and others. Prior to this workshop STAF was installed as the first set of the repository for common off-line software for RHIC experiments (CORE). Work was also carried out on developing the interface between ROOT and STAF. ROOT is under evaluation as another component of the CORE software.
On-line software
The activity for on-line at the TPC cosmic ray test is at a low level, consisting primarily of evaluating the run control/prototype state manager model as the model for the full on-line system. The cooperating state-machine model appears to work well. A short-cut taken with the prototype for the communications layer leads to the slightly annoying behavior of needing to be restarted about once per day, but does not impact the data acquisition for the cosmic test.As well, the decision was made to purchase two developer licenses for the Objectivity database so that it can be evaluated for its role in the full STAR on-line system. This purchase is in conjunction with the other RHIC experiments and the RCF.
Video-Conference Based Graduate Course on Relatavistic Heavy-ion Physics
In the Spring of 98, we will run a video-conferenced course covering the basics of relativistic heavy-ion physics. The idea is that there are many students joining RHIC, but at each institution there may be too few to mount a full, traditional course. Currently two universities are participating, MIT, MSU, but we are looking for a few more. A participating university can have students attend the course and/or have someone take responsibility for one or more lectures.
Below is the current format
8 modules on topic is Relatavistic Heavy-ion Physics. Each module consists of
RHIC Computing Review, July 29 - 31, at BNL. For further information, please contact Bruce Gibbard at BNL.
Greetings from Long Island. The warm summer weather arrived here on Long Island during the month of June. The last few weeks of the month in particular we've been having high temperatures in the mid to upper eighty degree F range with lows in the upper sixty to lower seventy degree F range. The water temperature around the Island (in the Atlantic ocean and the Long Island sound) has been rising through the month of June and is presently about 67 degrees F. The relatively chilly water takes a bit of getting used to, but it can be very refreshing on a hot summer day.
The installation of the coils in the STAR magnet was the main activity at the Assembly building throughout the month of June. As you may have already noticed by looking at the picture of the Assembly building on the WWW, all of the main magnet coils are now installed. This includes the ten main coils and the two space trim coils. The STAR magnet is an impressive sight to behold. The rate of requests for tours through the Assembly building has been steadily increasing. I haven't seen a tour of the Assembly Building in the Agenda for the upcoming Collaboration meeting, but I'm sure that we'll find time for one for those of you who will be coming to BNL for the meeting. Both of the large (75 tons a piece) iron poletips for the magnet also arrived at the Assembly building during June. They are presently located on the concrete apron outside of the building.
3. Contributions:
The following contribution was submitted by Craig Ogilvie, MIT
For more information please contact Craig Ogilvie, (617)253-4184 ogilvie@mitlns.mit.edu
4. Notice of Meetings:
STAR Collaboration Meeting, July 20 - 26, at BNL. For further information, please contact John Harris at Yale.
5. Christies Corner
6. Comings and goings at STAR
Gerd Kunde (Assistant Professor) and Brian Lasiuk (Research Associate) have joined the STAR group at Yale.
7. Employment opportunities
None reported this month
8. New STAR NOTES since the last Newsletter