CDF International Finance Committee Meeting (April 15, 2005)

Notes prepared based on originals made by Bob Tschirhart.

Attendance: Bedeschi (INFN-CDF),  Appel (FNAL-Directorate), Belforte (INFN-CDF),  Guibellino (INFN), Mueller (CDF-Karlsruhe), DongHee Kim (Korea-CDF), YoungKee Kim(CDF), Kotwal (CDF-Duke/FNAL), Lancaster (UK-CDF)-video, Montgomery (FNAL-directorate), Peach (PPARC)-video, Procario (DOE), Riska (Finland-CDF), Ristori (CDF), Roser (CDF-PPD), Sexton(FNAL/CDF/CD), Snider (FNAL-CD), Strait (FNAL-PPD), PK Teng (CDF-Taiwan), Tschirhart (FNAL-CD), Trischuk (Canada-CDF), Jim Whitmore (NSF).

Agenda & all talks are available at:

http://www-cdf.fnal.gov/physics/ifc/

This web page attepts to capture the postings associated with previous meetings.
                  
Notes

Scrutiny Group

In the preparation for this meeting, Montgomery had nominated the following to act as a Scrutiny Group:

  	Paolo Giubellino, INFN, Chair
	Shinhong Kim, Japan,
 	Ken Peach/Mark Lancaster, UK
	William Trischuk, Canada
	Rob Roser, CDF-PPD
	Rick Snider, CDF-CD
	Jim Strait, FNAL-PPD
	Bob Tschirhart, FNAL-CD

This group, in particular its Chair exchanged information with the CDF Management  before the IFC Meeting.

Montgomery – Welcome/News. 

Mont commented that this is the mid-year meeting and that the focus is on status, of the experiment, of the collaboration and of the contributions with a view toward the future. Fermilab was recently reviewed by a strong DOE committee. Things are going well but there are risks associated with budget projections which are flat in dollars. The corollary, if we are to be able to purchase materials is that staff drops by 4% every year. Of course he hopes that we can convince the US government otherwise.

Paolo Giubellino asked about the SWF projections, retirements, and possible savings of dollars by replacing older staff with younger staff. His is a second order effect because there is no hard retirement age.

Mont discussed progress on university MOUs. Review cycle will be two years.  

Mueller:  What is the impact of Fermilab taking a leadership role in ILC? Mont, it's an issue. But first steps have been taken with technolgy decision and there may now be a synergy between the different possible directions at Fermilab.
 
Luciano Ristori CDF Status

Congratulated the accelerator for its performance. He noted that 6 fb-1 by 2009 is a factor of ten to go. 
Review of upgrades, offline.  Close to "final" version of offline. Progress on infrastructure, SAM deployed to faciliate GRID computing. 

Discussion of how to design trigger tables to exploit/survive high
luminosity.  Means some physics will be prescaled.  Discussion of university

MOUs. Encountering pressure from LHC. Discussion of "volunteers"
throughout collaboration filling effort holes created by institutions not able to meet all MOU responsibilities.  
27 papers published or submitted, 41 under review.  Goal of 40 published papers in 2005.  The strategy is to publish papers based on the data up to the 2004 shutdown. INFN reps were not overwhelmed by this strategy.

Discussion of Bs & top measurements.  
In the Bs mixing group there are 70active participants and 24 PhD students!  Semileptonic and hadronic Bs
channels limit DMs to more than 7.9 ps-1 (95% CL).  Current world limit is 14ps-1, expectation is around 19-21 ps-1.   Need x10 sensitivity.  Some from luminosity, some from better analysis.  In principle as much as a factor of x4 in analysis improvements is possible.  
Discussion of improved top quark mass measurment.  An informa stab at a new world average of top quark mass yields a Higgs central mass about 80 Gev....pushed farther into the region excluded by LEP (<114 GeV).  Discussion of top quark mass systematics between channels. Discussion of Jet-Energy scale systematics.

Rob Roser: CDF Operations

Discussion of various operational strategies and tactics.  
25% of TDC modules modified, processed by PREP, and integrated into operations where they are running well.  
750 pb-1 of 900 pb-1 delivered  on tape.
Discussion of COT recovery.  
Silicon running at about 88% coverage.
Discussion of kicker prefires.  
Discussion of impacts due to holes in silcon coverage.  
Budgets from PPD, they essentially received what they requested for M&S and Guests and Visitors. PPD computing:  $400K (online, etc), $100K is core licensing & maintenance.  
For contributions, Rob prefers a clean scheme where Fermilab generates
invoices...will engender discussion.  
Last round of MOUs 2001-2005.  It is looking good for MOUs to 2007. 
"Offline computing" is listed in the contents of MOUs.
Offsite CAF-like  computing (maintinence & infrastructure & computing HW) is intended to be captured in MOUs.   

Ken Peach observes: FNAL has tough SWF times ahead... asks can responsibilities be transferred out of FNAL?  PPARC announcement of funding recently not so great.  "PPARC welcomed annoucement, not contents."  Peach expects flat, not flat-flat through the out years.

Rob indicated that  "Can operate at with less resources, but will cost running efficiency."  What is the perturbation theory of this? 
Bob T. pinged the committee and experiment on this, and there was significant push-back that the operation is as lean as possible now...and that there is no viable pertubation theory at this operating point. Now operating with 5-6% running deadtime at 1.5e32.  Looking for people to run operational shifts...not necessarily experts.

Pat Lukens:  Discussion of upgrades.

Luminosity profile projects x7-x10. 
L3 processing power needed by 2007 (x3 luminosity & x2 event size).  RunIIb L3 spec is 40 MB/sec.  With CSL spec this grows to 60 MB/sec (says YKK).

There was some discussion of whether the trigger table had been scrutinised.

Rick Snider: CDF Offline Computing

()

New tape technology not arriving till late 2005.   
They are concentrating on the strategy of getting to a single-pass production. This is not factored into cost projection table.   Discussion of possible non-linearities in compute projection.  
Non-linear fraction is +30% between 10e31 and 10e32 (Ashutosh).   
Remote disk will be an issue with Grid deployments.  
Showed M&S 1.8M request for FY05.  Allocated 1.26M.  Biggest hit is
in tape drives.  Starting to work on procurements now.  Extending
retirement cycle to 4 years. 
Could not accept all contributions to CAF in past 6 months.  
1 THz now onsite from contributions.  
Future?  Problem for small institutions.  Sum of many small contributions expected to be 0.3 THz.

Ken Peach:  Disk not following Moore's law?  
RS:  Not seeing a a dramatic effect. Dual core technology may mitigate Moore's law softening.  
$500K shortfall at Fermilab will mean we miss target.

Igor Sfiligoi: Remote Computing

 )  

Nine dedicated dCAFs 2.3 THz, 80 TB. Exploiting 1.1 THz at CNAF. 
FNAL CPU utilization close to 100%.  
Remote sites are mostly local users.  Discussion that the opportunistic LHC window of under-utilized resources.  One year?  2-3 years?  

Ken Peach:  Not stable in long term.  
Paulo Giubellino:  A fixed fraction (base) is allocated to CDF.  
Stefano Belforte: CDF is not assuming that all or even bulk will be  opportunistic...a base is required.  LCG based CAF under development, not ready for users...no effort yet on OSG version(?).

Discussion with Funding agencies:

Dan Riska(Finnish):  Appreciate reduced security (ease of physical access).

Ken Peach (UK-PPARC): Impressed with progress, CDF doing remarkably well, there is a good approach to the future program. Results from previous investment. The following are comments, not criticism. Both Fermilab and UK entering a period of strain on budgets, this is particularly bad timing for Moore's law to fall off...predicts difficutly for LHC.  

Thomas Mueller(Germany):  LHC computing will soon overwhelm LHC resources that may now be available...don't link too tightly. At the latest in 2008 CDF will need to be independent.

Nando Ferroni(INFN):  The experiment is doing remarkably well. Worried about the risk of manpower rolloff threatens a lot of physics. There is no problem with INFN supporting the physicists if they are staying. For computing, this will be the last year when CDF can ask for serious additional resources from CNAF; CNAF is buying for Italian Tier 1. 

Mont:  Along as doubling time remains reasonable then one might hope the  physicists will stay:  

Jim Whitmore (NSF):  NSF does not contribute a lot to CDF. Their main problems are with the manpower. Manpower if flat.  Not making explicit statements about moving to LHC, but of course there is an implicit constraint due to unitarity. They have put an extra post-doc in CDF for three years.

Paolo Giubellino (Scrutiny-INFN):  My notes indicate a comment from Paolo???