OWG Meeting 7-Nov-2012

Agenda

• Announcements
  • Ed will talk more on FPGA programming in Nov
  • Labview/EPICS training next week
• Review of minutes from 24-Oct-2012 meeting
• More on Simulated Raw Event Data - Elliott
  • hit data
  • event sizes and compression
  • processing rate
    • is single slot header word adequate?
• Counting House status - Hovanes, Elliott
  • Furniture
  • Switch and networks
  • UPS
• EPICS - Hovanes
• Controls - Elliott, Hovanes
  • Solenoid test review 6-Nov
  • EPICS to PLC connection
  • PLC and EPICS archiving
  • Elog
• JInventory database - Elliott
  • conventions
  • Hall A (Alexandre C)
• DAQ group projects- Bryan, Dave A, Graham, Carl, Vardan, Elliott
  • EVIO stream parser functions
  • CODA3, EVIO, ECS/CSS, disentangler, readout list, Java/cMsg GUI
• Electronics, trigger and DAQ status reports - Chris, Alex, Dave, Fernando, Ben, Ed, William, Bryan
• Mantis Task Tracker
• Midas Elog]]

• Calibration/Alignment issues?

Time/Location

1:30 PM Wed 7-Nov-2012 CC F326

Next Meeting

1:30 PM Wed 21-Nov-2012 CC F326

Minutes

Present: Elliott W, Simon T, Dave L, Bruyan M, Hovanes E, Elton S.

Simulated Raw Data

Elliott gave a detailed report on the status of running Dave A's mc2coda package in conjunction with the Hall D MC to produce simulated raw event files, see the slides for full details. This study is ongoing, but highlights include:

• mc2coda currently simulates N=1 block mode readout, a verbose and redundant format needed by CODA to catch errors.
• Get x4 reduction in size by eliminating redundancies and unneeded information, low-L events average under 8 kB.
• Still can gzip files by 60%, not sure why, perhaps lots of empty bytes in the upper range of ADC and TDC values.
• Tape drives compress data so gzip'ing files will not save on tapes.
• A number of anomalies exist in the energy and time values, Simon and others will have a look.
• Dave L is producing a high-L data file.
• mc2coda runs at about 180 Hz on low-L simulated data.
• Eventually want to reconstruct events from EVIO data and verify same results as from original HDDM data.

Counting House

Hovanes and Elliott reported on a number of items:

• The UPS is on and we need to turn on the RDC and some branch circuits.
• The network switch is programmed for Hall D networks.
• Facilities will come up with a proposal for furniture and console layout for the conference and controls rooms.
• We need to begin thinking about purchasing computers, file servers, RAID system, Infiniband equipment, etc.

EPICS

• Still no luck inviting people from Yerevan or MEPHI.
• Hovanes created the IOC for the solenoid test based on an XML dump of the PLC program.
• Beni needs a CAEN HV control system and GUI for the FDC tests.

Solenoid Test

Review on Tues went well, only minor recommendations expected. This review was only for cryo operations, still need a review of powered operations. Otherwise preparations are moving quickly, we likely will begin to cool down in early to mid Dec, as requested by the DOE.

EVIO

Elliott and Carl are upgrading EVIO to provide more stream functionality, i.e. data access without having to create a full in-memory object model of the data. CLAS12 needs this, it will be useful for us as well.

DAQ

• Do we need our own DHCP server? We're hoping to use the one maintained by the CC.
• Bryan M. will help with setting up the ROC hardware and operating system.
• We hope to get some farm nodes from the CC for initial testing in the counting house (later...we will get 4 x 16 cores Wed 14-Nov).
• The ROC purchase is split, first order is for 15 boards, 10 weeks delivery, 7 or 8 for us.
• The "smoked" ROC was replaced by the vendor (finally!).