Reported by JOHN HARRIS
We all wish the PHENIX Project good luck in their upcoming technical, cost and schedule review this month. We anticipate that there will be a call for proposals from DOE/NP for detector upgrades soon after PHENIX starts construction. In view of this it is now critically important that we converge on understanding the performance (detector and physics) of the funded STAR detector and potential upgrades using the integrated STAR simulation software. This information must be in hand by the next collaboration meeting, possibly before then, depending upon DOE's timescale for upgrade proposals. Therefore, I encourage members of STAR to seriously consider spending time working on detector and physics simulations and to attend the upcoming STAR Workshop on Software and Simulations (see and sign up for item 11 below). I also ask you to contact Matt Bloomer (with cc to me) to sign up for responsibility for specific physics simulations tasks. IF YOU HAVE A PHYSICS INTEREST IN STAR, YOU SHOULD MAKE SURE ABOUT STAR P ERFORMANCE ON IT NOW! (Remember that the results of these simulations will be quoted, with proper reference given to the authors, in future presentations to exemplify STAR physics potential and expectations.)
I fully expect that there will be newly-funded upgrade detectors and new collaborators added to STAR prior to startup. Both will require some work: 1) to determine which new detector systems can increase the physics of STAR and 2) to determine the best ways in which strong new groups can contribute and participate in STAR. The funded STAR Detector and the STAR Collaboration are dynamical quantities, requiring careful evaluation at each successive step of improvement (additional detector component or collaborator). We must continuously seek the best means of improving STAR. We cannot sit back and wait for the present "baseline" to be constructed so that we can take data with it in 1999. With continuous re-evaluation by all, we can successfully accomplish what we initially set out to do physics-wise (and more).
Further effort was spent documenting the justification for STAR s proposed stretch-out costs. As reported in the December monthly report, RHIC and STAR management have reached a tentative agreement on the total stretch- out cost. The $3.6M in additions to the baseline budget is the result of an estimated $2.5M in additional labor, $0.6M in additional material costs, and $0.5M in additional contingency requirements.
Final planning is underway for the TPC OFC Preliminary Design Review (PDR) and the Magnet Coil Final Design Review (FDR), both to be held in February.
An effort to develop a grounding plan for the detector began, and a preliminary design concept was completed. Effort focused on ensuring that a single-point ground to the detector is implemented to eliminate ground loops. A recommendation was made to the TC to electrically isolate the detector from the steel floor plates, because it is not feasible to isolate the detector rails from RHIC ground.
A study to understand the electrical interaction of the magnet and its power supply with the rest of the detector was started. From a quick calculation, it was found that it may be necessary to change the way that the power leads attach to the coils.
The first attempt to allocate rack space on the platforms was completed. The layout allocates the 3 floor levels of rack space to each subsystem in a logical way, and provides some reserve space to be managed by the integration group for future modifications and growth.
Review comments of the latest facility plans were submitted to the RHIC Plant Engineering Group.
(courtesy of Tim Hallman)
The STAR Council Meeting at the 8th STAR Collaboration Meeting was held at LBL on Monday, January 31, 1994.
The first topic on the agenda was a discussion of the status of the STAR Construction Project by Project Director, Jay Marx. In his remarks, Jay indicated that significant progress was being made in essentially all areas of the construction project. Several new appointments were noted, including Lee Schroeder as Deputy Project Director, Dick Jared as Chief Electrical Engineer, and Bill Edwards as Chief Mechanical Engineer. Also, Russ Wells was introduced as the new lead engineer for the TPC Project, replacing the retiring Roger Stone.
Jay also addressed the effects of the stretchout of RHIC. Discussions with the RHIC management had been conducted, with the result that the funding profile and stretchout costs for STAR were now understood by both STAR and RHIC, assuming a March '99 start. Jay reviewed the schedule of the STAR project with the Council, indicating that in view of the funding stretchout, there is little if any schedule contingency. He also indicated that at present STAR still needs to resolve a management challenge of approximately $2M. Some related concerns were also noted. Specifically, it was pointed out that although the RHIC project has been stretched out, there is presently no plan in place for support for essential R&D activities which may also be stretched out beyond FY96. Jay also related that DOE was reassured to learn that thus far committments made to provide resources for the STAR Construction Project had been honored, and that the effort to sign the remaining Institutional MOU's would continue.
Additional discussion pertained to the upcoming DOE review of the NP DOE programs, with a reminder that help with presentation materials could be arranged if they were requested early enough.
John Harris then presented a discussion of the status of the STAR Collaboration. John indicated that in general the Collaboration is functioning well and growing stronger. It was indicated however that additional manpower is needed in some areas. In particular help is needed with the software effort, where the total manpower needed is estimated to be 100-150 man years. The present status of the software was discussed with the conclusion that the software infrastructure is now fairly well developed, and the software to examine the performance of individual detector components is in place. Work is continuing on a fully integrated software package to make detailed examination of the physics performance of the integrated detector. This package is not yet available. John also indicated that it is a challenge to match the "new talents" of strong groups which have requested to join STAR with the "old needs", but that STAR management would continue to pursue this with vigor.
Another concern which arose was the difficulty that young career people in the field may experience in the face of continuing budget difficulties. This concern was echo'd by various members of the STAR Council, although several members did indicate that opportunities still exist. The sense of the discussion was that people should do whatever possible to help.
Following the presentation of John Harris, the council discussed a request to join STAR by several institutes of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (Dubna), and an expression of interest in joining STAR by the Max Planck Institute (Munich). The MPI group was strongly encouraged to work with STAR to identify their contributions and responsibilities and that STAR would assist in whichever ways possible to help facilitate their proposal to the MPI Directorate to join STAR. A request by MPI to join STAR would be entertained after approval by the MPI Directorate of the MPI group's potential role in STAR. The council considered that for the request by JINR to join STAR, a decision on admission should be postponed until details of the contributions which would be made could be worked out and entered into an MOU. The sense of the discussion was quite positive, with many statements of support for both MPI and JINR. In the specific case of JINR, the council considered that the various institutes should join as one group from JINR. The information available from discussions with representatives from PPL and LHE suggested that this would not be a problem.
Following this discussion, Ed Platner reported that the STAR Physics Committee would meet the following Saturday, and would discuss what information was required from the simulations in order to arrive at an optimal upgrade configuration providing the most physics return per dollar, in view of the funding constraints. A general discussion followed concerning the status of several proposals for upgrade funding.
Lee Schroeder and Tim Hallman then gave a presentation concerning the present status of collaboration between STAR and several Russian institutions. It was generally concluded that communication had recently improved significantly with the result that the basis for collaboration in several areas had been identified.
John Harris then proposed that for the Council lunch meeting, some elaboration of the STAR publication policies regarding the availability of the code/input parameters/assumptions used in the preparation of simulations and presentations be discussed.
The meeting closed with a discussion of the time and location for the next Collaboration meeting. It was later decided at the Council lunch, that the next meeting would be held the week of August 15 at BNL. It was agreed that a suggestion from Prof. Strikhanov (MEPhI) to hold a future meeting in Russia would be explored further.
The first phase of the partial sector test (PST) is complete. The results give a 400-volt operating margin in P-10 gas, and even more in He/ethane. With the success of the PST and subsequent ABDB tests, production of both the sector backer and the pad plane PC board has been approved.
A review of the TPC/Iron support is in progress, and has resulted in moving the mounting location for these supports to a common horizontal plane.
An RFQ for the purchase of a cleanroom has been issued, but changes in the SNO production schedule may allow the cancellation of the order.
A detailed design of the steel continued with emphasis on setting up an assembly procedure that will ensure the needed accuracy of the placement of the steel and coils.
DAQ decided in January to replace the architecture based on the T9000 transputer. A decision was made to separate the choice of CPUs from that of the networking architecture. An in-depth investigation of the Intel i960 for use on the receiver boards is in progress. DAQ decided to choose a network architecture that would accommodate several manufacturers? products. SCI (Scalable Coherent Interface, IEEE 1596) is the ideal networking architecture for DAQ needs. For the short term, DAQ will build and test prototype receiver boards, including processor boards, using VME64, a backplane standard supported by several manufacturers. Michi Botlo has joined the BNL DAQ effort.
The Trigger effort was directed toward its presentation at the collaboration meeting in early-February. This task involved coordinating the Monte-Carlo work with the theory or algorithm work, which was accomplished successfully. Work on interface specifications both internal and external continues.
Before the collaboration meeting, STAR Controls subsystem contacts were provided with the Requirements and Interface document from the October CDR. Each contact was invited to prepare a paper outlining their present thinking on the interaction of their subsystem with STAR Controls as a basis for discussion at the upcoming meeting. As its task for the immediate future, the STAR Controls group was charged with writing a Requirements document and a Specifications document. The RT ?93 paper (Gross, Cherney, McShane) has been accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions of Nuclear Science. Iwona Sakrejda has joined the RHIC group at Creighton University.
Effort was directed mainly toward performing simulations using existing packages as part of the effort to better understand detector performance.
Work progressed in several areas within the infrastructure software, but no significant items were completed in January. The areas of progress included the code development library, data management, analysis shell and on-line data access.
The most significant area of progress concerns putting the table/dataset library into both the mini-DAQ and the analysis shell which will facilitate the analysis of TPC sector test data in the standard STAR analysis framework.
Contributed by ED PLATNER
The physics committee met on Saturday February 5. Attending were B. Bonner, M, Bloomer, J. Carroll, T. Cormier, K. Foley, J. Harris, J. Marx, E. Platner and M. Tinknell. John presented his two simulation priority lists presented to the collaboration on February 4. We restated the need for simulations in order to make decisions. It turns out the ordering John presented was found by this committee to be in the right priority order. The lists are presented below:
The next (fourth) RHIC luminosity meeting will be held sometime in the time period from mid-March to mid-April at BNL. The purpose of these meetings is to discuss topics of mutual interest to the different RHIC experiments and the RHIC accelerator. The tentative agenda for this meeting is:
The halls of the Physics building have been buzzing with PHENIX people as they prepare for their second go at a final cost and schedule review. The review will be held here at BNL on March 9th and 10th. I plan to attend.
It looks like there will be some sort of review of the PHOBOS proposal in April. I'll pass on the date when the plans firm up.
Detector R&D funding for RHIC is scheduled to phase out in 1995. Tom Ludlam would like to get any documents/publications which have resulted from studies supported with the RHIC detector R&D money. These can be in any format, from STAR notes to NIM articles. Tom is interested in seeing any publishable results pushed through and published.
Reported by HANK CRAWFORD
We now have two rules for detectors set by the trigger-daq interface, really one rule and one corollary:
Rule No. 1. If a detector wants to take data at other than the TPC data rate, it must provide its own pipeline capabilities for intermediate storage. Corollary . No event can be embedded in the history of another event having detectors in common. These two rules make for a clean interface.
We are now keeping our trigger information on the World Wide Web. We have not finalized a format, however, so the index, etc. may change a bit as we try different approaches. Please feel free to comment on what you see there.
We are making progress on the optimization of pixel layout based on the constraints of space, money, and the limitations of our information analysis. Special attention is being paid to biases introduced by our algorithms so that we do not design too specifically.
Ed Platner is in charge of trigger detector upgrade ideas. Please feel free to contact him with new ideas, comments, etc.
We would like to organize a workshop around level 3 trigger ideas. Note that level 3 is expected to have available all of the outer padrow data from the TPC as well as all of the SVT data. The basic idea is to exploit this information, along with the information from fast detectors such as the CTB and EMC, to improve our event selection. This means, to enrich the physics of interest in the selected data sample. Think of this process as the same as making cuts on event selection for analysis. What cuts would you like to apply to select a data set for your physics analysis?
The type of cuts you envision will guide us in determining what level of track analysis must be done at level 3. We need your help in specifying these cuts. Assume that we can provide track information from the outer 16 padrows of the TPC and that we can have track information from the SVT. What should we look for in these tracks? Hyperons? Kaons? Jets? What?
Trigger ideas will help guide DAQ hardware choices, just as DAQ architecture affect how we will implement trigger ideas. If you are interested in looking at issues concerning level 3 tracking or if you have specific physics signatures that you would use to guide cut selection, please contact Hank crawford and plan to attend a workshop on these topics in mid May. We will wait until we hear from you, members of the full collaboration, before finalizing any workshop schedule. We want input from all of you, not just our trigger committee.
The third BNL workshop on Software and Simulations for STAR is scheduled for April 4 through 8, 1994. The workshop will take place in Building 510 at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY 11973.
There will be training sessions introducing STAR software style and techniques to beginners as well as more advanced sessions for designing and implementing simulation and analysis software.
This early announcement is to enable people to make travel plans. More details of the workshop will be regularly posted to the World Wide Web. From the STAR menu page click STAR Workshops and then 4-8apr94.
Please respond to Sharon Smith ((516) 282-3995 or smith2@bnldag.ags.bnl.gov) if you are planning to come and tell her what housing arrangements you would like - please include your arrival and departure dates. This time of the year on-site housing should not be a problem and would certainly be more convenient. When making travel plans please note that April 3 is Easter Sunday and also the start date for daylight savings time.
A number of people seem to have heard of this workshop only by word of mouth. If you are interested at all in the computing efforts for STAR I recommend that you join the starsoft mailing list by sending an e-mail message to listserv@lbl.gov containing (on a single line)
subscribe starsoft "your name"
e-mail it from the machine to which you would like starsoft messages sent. If you change your mind after reading some of the messages you can send an e-mail to listserv@lbl.gov with the single line unsubscribe starsoft and it should stop.
Reported by Howard Wieman
A preliminary design review was held for the outer field cage of the TPC. This was a review of the gas insulator design for the 90 kV field cage. The review committee endorsed the design and testing approach that is being taken. The committee had several very useful suggestions, one of which was using a poor insulator gas to test and condition (spark) the structure at reduced voltage to limit the stored energy. The committee provided a good mix of experience and expertise in both high voltage and mechanical design. The members of the committee were Andy Faltens, Ron Madaras, Alan Paterson, Louis Reginato. Andy Faltens and Louis Reginato are electrical engineers with the Heavy Ion Fusion Accelerator Research (HIFAR) program and have extensive experience with high voltage in accelerator work. Ron Madaras was the physicist in charge of the field cage construction for the PEP4 TPC and Alan Paterson is the head mechanical engineer for ALS.
Alexei Lebedev from MEPhI has been working at LBL for a couple of weeks developing designs for the STAR laser system. He will be developing and testing these designs further when he returns to Russia.
Reported by Rene Bellwied
1.) hardware issues
final electronics:
The SVT software group was very active over the last few months. Most of the subroutines are integrated into TAS. This format is now generally accepted as the standard for all STAR simulations. Routines are available for the following tasks: standalone tracking, track display, matching between SVT and TPC, de/dx in the SVT, momentum resolution in the SVT, secondary vertex reconstruction, main vertex reconstruction, detector response simulator (slow and fast simulator), SVT geometry. Online software (cluster finder, zero suppression etc.) is in progress. Questions should be directed to Claude Pruneau or Spiros Margetis. A new STAR note (#145) summarizes the present status of the package and shows details of the TAS implementation.
3.) DAQ developments