Minutes of T2UK meeting at RHUL 6th Feb 2008

Present: Fred, Gordon, Nikos, Pedro, Andrzej, Barry, Jenna, Jiri, Paul, John, Simon, Tracy, Bill, Stefan, Alex, Thorsten

Minutes last meeting: No comments.

News

FDR underway. Shipping data to tier-0 and runnig reconstruction (which is currently crashing). Starting with nominal geometry, calculated alignment constants (1.5.days on a single PC).

ATLAS detector paper has been submitted (around Xmas). CSC notes coming (March).

Schedule not officially changed (rumours of 1 month delay, mid-July). Cooling of sectors 3-4 weeks behind schedule, machine checkout & hardware commissioning now overlapping.

Recent Activities

Robins

A couple of new problems since last meeting. One has shown the symptoms of bad PLX chip (some of the latest German production have similar problem so we're not alone). Would like a "robinExpress" same as robin but with a PCI express interface instead of PCI-X. Should start buying components before the money evaporates. Discussion of robin replacement for SLHC. Discussions next week in CERN with Philippe to gather requirements.

ROS

Fred reported that the CERN group have been carrying out some ROS recabling. Technical run ongoing this week checking out tdaq-01-08-04.

HLT farms

Fred reported that our american colleagues have to spend money now. He's been helping them to choose which machines to buy. ~500 machines to arrive in CERN around end Feb/ begining of March for use in April. More performant quad cores than existing CPUs.

Networks

Second controls core switch installed and running. Second core data switch installed. Currently some ROS data goes through both switches, 2nd stage is to make everything dual pathed.

HLT tracking

CSC note progressing (new draft scheduled for Friday)

Jiri

EF tracking performance, timing etc. Less fake tracks than L2, details on the slides. Some discussion on clarity of plot where fake tracks beyond range of generated momentum. should be clarified in text of CSC note.

Stefan

ID DQMF segment included in November tech run. Only have few automatic tests (keep it manageble). Using test for "not empty" histos can see which algs inactive (grey), OK (green) and error (red).

List of quantities to monitor discussed with tier-0 monitoring people, initial list created.

Dmitry

Slides on web page. Looking at severl slices. No big surprises. Data preparation timing proportional to RoI size.

John

Optimisation for different RoI types. IDscan need to look at optimising the tau, B-phys and bjet slice. Look at more realistic and problematic data samples. Corrupting (truncating) fragments in bytestream files. At L2 ID code runs without crashing. Dmitry to change code to return error code if unpacking has a problem. Hope to have some guidelines by robustness workshop (4th March). EF use converters which don't have a return code so must use exceptions, follow up with offline people. John would like to investigate effects status codes in ROB header.

EDM meeting

TrigIndetTrack biggest problem (runs both SiTrack and IDSCAN +...) having multiple copies of tracks due to the way persistency works (Dmitry has halved the size taken by tracks in persistency). Need to discuss/decide what amount of info goes into the different data formats (ESD/AOD/DPD)

Nikos

Should think about how to run Fex algorithms from ESD Simon: Data model group told to put in document that trigger people will always need access to raw data.

Monitoring

During M5 used different version of PT for Atlantis montoring which can run asynchronously with the TDAQ run. Working on tdaq-01-08-04 version for M6.

Release coordination (Simon)

13.0.40.2 Was to be used for FDR but not ready yet so they're using a nightly 13.2.0 for M6 got ready by Ricardo

14.0.0 Due end of Feb

14.1, 14.2 ... every 6 weeks

Simon coordinating 14.0 for trigger, need more coordinators

Validation (Ricardo)

Moving ref files from each test to afs 13.2.0 afew non-critical patches in P1 cache

discussion of the difference between DQM and software validation. Same quantities histogrammed but different tools used for checking DQMF or straioght comparison of histogram files.

Region selector:

New region selector to be pushed into the nightlies asap, must have it by for rel-14. Online spacepoint tool should be changed to use new region selector, 4fold increase in performance. Still need to make changes to enable/disable ROBs from OKS dtabase. Nikos to forward mail about new interface to Dmitry and Jiri. Mark to look at TRT code as well.

HLT steering

Nothing much to say, most of the work already coverd by EDM point above and Trigger config next.

Trigger Configuration(Paul):

slides on twiki.

Documentation "not ideal but growing".

John: Should there be another way to change histogram ranges? Keep separate so monitoring desk can change tem but should not have write access to trigger database. More generally, discussion of having different roles for using trigger tool with different access permissions.

Discussion of applying a change to multiple objects (e.g. changing a prescale for many items gives you RSI).

Menus

3 Bphys CSC notes merging to one

Next meeting

• 12th March 11:00 phone meeting
• Face to face possibly 16th April at RAL to be confirmed

Finance

Current spend 65K another 90K just being signed off. Need to order compnents for robinExpress before end of year Any other items people want should be requested ASAP.

Travel 49K spent (40K LTA 9K short visit). Still enough left for more short trips this year. Claims to go in asap by the end of March.

-- GordonCrone - 07 Feb 2008