PrimEx Software Meeting Minutes

Thursday, April 8, 2004

Present: Eric Clinton, Dan Dale, Raphael Demirchyan, Mark Ito, David Lawrence, Dustin McNulty, Vasily Mochalov, Itaru Nakagawa, Aram Teymurazyan

Nominate secretary

Mark agreed to act as secretary.

Approve last week's minutes

Approved as written.

Eric reported that the problem with the "double" beam hole that Dustin showed at the last meeting was traced to an indexing problem in psim_digitize and has been fixed. He mentioned that there are other issues with clustering that still need to be resolved.

Changes to today's agenda

None.

Readyness and schedule for online test II: Itaru

Itaru announced that we are tentatively scheduled to begin the second online software test on Monday, April 12 starting at noon. Sergei has not made a firm commitment to giving us this time, so Itaru encouraged us to be flexible.

Dave mentioned that if anyone would like to test their code in advance of Monday's collective test, the DAQ system in the Test Lab is available. It has all of the necessary components, including a functioning ET ring, that are necessary to run our online software.

Itaru asked about the readyness of the veto monitoring program. Eric reported that veto_calib is close to finished, but there might be a few bugs left to squash before Monday.

Itaru also asked about readyness of the online HyCal calibration code. Raphael reported that there was still some work remaining in the conversion to ROOT.

Dustin mentioned that the ability to look at merged events (one event from two "minimum bias" events) to simulate accidentals in the data stream would be an significant advance over what we did in the first online test. Dave agreed to point Mark in the right direction for fixing the code to do this.

Dustin mentioned that the pi-zero events that we ran with last time had the bug (mentioned above) in psim_digitize reflected in the data. We could re-digitize this data in preparation for Monday. Itaru and Dustin will make a decision on whether this is worth the effort.

Itaru agreed to write down an informal run plan for the test on Monday and send it to the email list.

Temperature Monitoring for HyCal: Jar

Jar showed us a live display of his temperature monitoring screen. Here is a screen shot from yesterday:
The scheme is to use a web browser to access the PC's console display via VNC. The PC itself will be located in the Hall. Jar is working with the computer center to install a remote reboot facility. The group thought that what he had was a pretty good representation of the quantities that we should be monitoring visually. Still there were several suggestions: These data will be available as EPICS variables as well. This will be necessary to insert them into the datastream. In addition, we should set up EPICS-based alarms. It will not be necessary to re-create the visual display in EPICS.

Status of non-expert online histogram-viewing system: Aram

Aram proposed a system for viewing our online histograms. The ROOT macro he has written will have two modes, manual and auto, manual for experts who want to select individual historgram, auto for the non-expert who want to view a pre-selected subset (not quite what he presented, but close). The user configures the system by specifying the systems that should be available for display. The configuration can be saved and will be used as the default for subsequent sessions. Some suggestions to Aram: Notwithstanding these and other excellent suggestions, initially Aram will focus on a minimal system for the non-expert shift taker.

Standard root-tree/ntuple for PrimEx: all

Mark brought up the idea of having a standard PrimEx root-tree or ntuple that we could all use. That might avoid duplication effort. Dave thought that this was an issue that we could defer until we have some real production data to work with. We went along with Dave's suggestion.

Beam normalization software issues: all

Mark wanted to explore whether we need to have some high-level planning to insure that all of the necessary software components to do flux normalization are in place. If a plan is called for, how do we develop the plan?

Dave reminded us that he and Itaru have been working on software to do online photon flux monitoring. The work has been on hold recently. We deferred a full discussion of this item to a future meeting given the lateness of the hour.

Software meeting time: all

We agreed to move the meeting to Tuesdays at 3:30 pm starting the week after next. We felt that having a software meeting this coming Tuesday would be too soon after the online test.