2. STAR Project Summary
Excerpted from the STAR Monthly Report for November 1998.
Magnet mapping was completed on schedule; TPC installation has begun and is progressing on schedule; and DAQ has begun production. The STAR detector is on track for completion in June.
TPC Summary and Highlights
Assembly of the cooling skid has been completed but leaks were found during initial testing. The installation hardware for the TPC is complete and delivered to BNL and the installation process is well underway. The TPC has been disconnected from its auxiliary systems (gas, laser, and water) and the cleanroom tent was moved out of the way to allow insertion of the installation beam sections in the magnet. The TPC Support arms have been installed and aligned, the 352ä installation beam sections are installed and aligned and the Lower Frame has been assembled and positioned. The next task is to lift the TPC from the Assembly Building floor to its pre-insertion position on top of the Lower Frame.
Magnet Summary and Highlights
Construction is complete and Magnet has met all of its requirements. See WBS 4.11 Installation and Testing for a summary of Magnet testing activities.
Electronics Summary and Highlights
Front End Electronics (FEE)
The last remaining FEE boards were returned to LBNL in November. Final assembly and testing is underway. Because of an illness, final assembly and testing is not complete; this will not impact our schedule significantly.Readout board stuffing began and was completed. Testing, however, will be significantly slower. Also, the FPGA programming still needs to be finalized.
FEE now understands the problem with the Radstone HDLC boards for slow controls. Radstone admits that there is a defect in their firmware that prevents us from using channel one. The company will work on a fix, but this will require too much time. Consequently, FEE has opted to downgrade these boards for the previous revision. That revision worked and was used for FEE Îs software development. How to handle long-term support and future needs for additional detector elements is presently being discussed.
Power supply installation on the platforms awaits repair of the water leaks. Switches were replaced for those broken when the power supplies were mishandled while they were stored in the future STAR control room. Our inability to install the power is forcing us to rearrange our schedules, and it is possible that there may be no manpower available when the platforms are finally ready.
Data Acquisition (DAQ)
The Final Design Review for DAQ took place on November 23, 1998. As a result of this review, DAQ has been approved to begin production of the receiver boards, mezzanine boards, and busy distribution modules. The contractors gave a completion date of April 31, 1999 for the mezzanine and receiver boards.The software required to read a single readout card for the purpose of checking TPC FEE cards is now complete.
Preparation of the racks in the DAQ room is almost complete. All the DAQ crates are installed and most of the wiring for ethernet and serial cables is complete. Water cooling in these racks is shut off pending installation of solenoid valves linked to the leak detection system.
Trigger
Thirty more CTB trays were completed in November, bringing the total available to 96. The prototype ADC board for the CTB was fabricated; and it is being tested. All of the electronics interface boards were prototyped, including the Detector-Interface-Board (DIB), the DSM Interface board (DSMI) and the TCU interface board (TCUI). These are being set into the LBNL Trigger System Test prior to shipment to BNL. A board for testing the 400 MWC FEE boards was designed, and it has begun fabrication. The MWC FEE board fabrication was completed. After loading and testing a single unit, the remaining 399 boards were sent out for loading. The MWC Sector Control Board was designed and layout was completed; the sector receiver board design progressed to the 50% mark. The TCU was tested and is being placed in the Trigger System Test to check the trigger-clock-distribution system. The production DSM is presently being tested with completion scheduled for mid-December. The three VME crates sent to LBNL were set up for the System Test and the individual laboratory test beds. A fan mod kit was ordered from Wiener to fix a problem with backplane fan placement.The Trigger System Test was assembled and acts as a VME workbench for all of our board testing. This mirrors the system in place for the system test at BNL as far as the front ends are concerned and will be used in ADC board testing and MWC system tests here. The Slow Controls test of the LeCroy 1440 HV system for the CTB was tested and declared ready. A preliminary interface between Online and Trigger was documented and placed, along with all STAR Trigger Interface documents, on the WWW in the Trigger area. The minimal shell for trigger operation is up and working on the system test hardware at BNL.
Slow Controls
A skeleton, EPICS GPIB, device support routine has been written for the control of the Wavetex 395 waveform generator. The downloading of waveforms comprising large data blocks is not, however, immediately apparent due to the absence of an appropriate, record-specific, output function within the EPICS GPIB library. On the other hand, it is noted that the capability to ONLY read waveforms into an EPICS waveform record, is supported.Work on the EPICS-based control and monitoring system for the Central Trigger Barrel has started.
The Java Display Manager (JDM) library package from TJNL has been installed and test applets displaying STAR controls data was created. Several comments and bugs were reported to the authors. Further development work awaits a new release of JDM.
Computing Summary and Highlights
November was a key decision making month for Computing. We held a series of six workshops on Offline computing to address outstanding issues in how STAR software will be implemented for MDC2 and year one. In a final workshop on November 20 and meetings with the physics working groups on subsequent days, a long list of decisions was ratified that set our direction in many respects: ROOT will be used as the analysis framework; STAF-style codes will be sup- ported through year one, but by MDC2 all codes will be used in the ROOT environment; the DST data model used by application codes will be C++; new analysis codes will be written in C++; the event store will be a hybrid Objectivity/ROOT design. A full list of the decisions is linked from the computing pages. Production activity and development work made little prog- ress during the month due to the workshops and a long period of severe network disruption at Brookhaven. In Online, work proceeded on the Objectivity-based configuration database, code tuning and GUI development. One of our Online developers, Nathan Stone, left Brookhaven; a new position is being opened to fill this urgent vacancy.
Conventional Systems and Integration Summary and Highlights
Water system work on the south platform continues; several leaks remain. Electrically actuated valves were ordered to give us the independent ability to automatically shut off water on the 1st floor south platform, 2nd floor south platform, and the DAQ room water in the event a water leak is detected in any of the racks.The design of the electrical feed to the detector has been completed and wiring will begin in early December. The power distribution throughout the detector was completed earlier; it is the only remaining feed from the wall to the detector. It will have the capability to be quickly disconnected, move with the detector bridge, and be reconnected in the WAH.
A scaffolding system for access to the TPC faces was designed this month. The purchase contract was placed for delivery in late December. This adaptation of commercial scaffolding was reviewed and approved by the RHIC Experimental Safety Committee. It fits inside the magnet and allows safe access to the entire face of the TPC as well as the CTB ends.
A review of the Global Interlocks System took place and valuable input was received. Final design touches and additional purchases are taking place now.
Installation and Test Summary and Highlights
A successful conclusion to the magnet mapping occurred on the evening of Nov 6th. The Magnet was shut down at that time and will next be turned on in March for final check out and TPC cosmics testing in a magnetic field.TPC installation has begun and is on schedule. The TPC should be mounted inside the magnet by December 3rd. Water-cooled buss and MCW piping efforts continue as does AC power distribution within the WAH.
Project Management
The STAR Global Interlocks system underwent a design review this month. No serious issues were uncovered, and permission to procure related PLC hardware was given.DAQ had a Final Design Review (FDR) on November 23rd. This review was very successful and DAQ immediately began production on receiver and mezzanine boards.
At this point, Trigger Electronics is the only STAR baseline element that has yet to have its FDR and begin production.
A status review of On-line Computing will take place in December.
The TPC installation procedure as well as all related analysis notes were submitted to the RHIC ESC for review, and by month-end approval was imminent.
Systems Integration
Installation planning of the CTB, TPC as well as the remaining FTPC and TPC FEE cables continued this month.More VME crates have been modified so that low voltage bus wires are not exposed. It was discovered that some of the recently shipped VME crates were missing some reinforcing bars and a J3 cover. The manufacturer has agreed to replace them.
STAR Note SN0378, Acceptable Cables for Use at STAR, has been issued. This note describes guidelines for acceptable cables at STAR.
A measurement of the water flow in the DAQ racks was taken. These data revealed that the water flow exceeded the required water flow of 2 gal/min by at least 50%.
The Ground Integrity Detector has been shipped to BNL for installation in December.
Work has begun to specify a humidity and temperature monitor for the platform.
The following institutions and people contributed to the cabling of the detector. The reason that the cabling went so well was that all of the sub-systems worked together. This group effort worked much better and faster. I really appreciated the hard work and effort from these people.
Greetings from Long Island. The weather here on Long Island has been fairly seasonal for the last three weeks of December. We received our first snow accumulation of the year on the evening of December 23rd. It amounted to about one to two inches of snow, which stayed around until the 29th. On the 30th we got a light dusting of snow and the temperature started dropping. The high temperature for this last day of 1998 is about 25 F, and it looks like it's going to be a cold New Year's night, with lows about 20 F.
1998 has been a huge year for the STAR project! When the year started the TPC was just getting started on setting up their gas system and test setup at the STAR site. During the year the TPC subsystem has:
As we head into the final six months of the project, STAR is in very good shape. It's rather amazing to me that we are actually about to enter 1999, and come to the end of the construction phase of the baseline STAR detector. For years and years and years, 1999 always seemed to be a long way down the road, yet here we are. The RHIC project schedule has us taking data with STAR starting in five months (June), and at this point all indications are that this schedule will be met. I'm eagerly anticipating seeing the first events!
Speaking of taking data, the upcoming STAR collaboration meeting (January 31st - February 6th) will be the last one before we start into operations. Making the transition to operations will be a major topic of the meeting. It should be an interesting discussion and I hope to see many of you here at BNL for the meeting. HAPPY NEW YEAR!
3. Contributions:
The following was submitted by Howard Matis, LBNL.
Creighton - Tom McShane
Purdue - Blair Stringfellow
Davis - Mike Anderson
LBL - Bill Edwards
Howard Wieman
Jim Thomas
Howard Matis
Fred Bieser
UC-SSL - Hank Crawford
Jack Englege
Leo Greiner
BNL - Alexei Lebedev
Ralph Brown
Dave Dayton
IHEP-Provino - Alexandre Korakash
Ohio State - Wayne Betts
CMU - Chris Kunz
Zoran Milosevich
4. Notice of Meetings:
STAR collaboration meeting. January 31 - February 6th, at BNL. For further information please contact John Harris.
5. Christies Corner
During 1998 the magnet:
In addition to the more apparent TPC and magnet systems that have been installed this past year, there has been a plethora of other equipment and systems brought online. Some examples of these systems are the power distribution, the rack installation, the modified water installation, and the network installation.
6. Comings and goings at STAR
None reported this month.
7. Employment opportunities
CREIGHTON UNIVERSITY
POSTDOCTORAL POSITION
Applications are invited for a research opening in relativistic heavy ion physics starting in early 1999. The group is working on the hardware controls system (using EPICS and CDEV) and test data analysis for the STAR experiment. Applicants should outline their experience with electronic interfaces and controls software. The successful candidate will have an interest in working with undergraduate and Masters students. He/she must be willing to divide time between projects at BNL and Creighton. Contact Dr. Michael Cherney, Physics Department, Creighton University, 2500 California Plaza, Omaha, NE 68178. Creighton University is an Equal Opportunity / Affirmative Action Employer.
8. New STAR NOTES since the last Newsletter