Minutes of T2UK phone mtg / 06 Dec 2006

Present: John Baines, Paul Bell, Gordon Crone, Dmitry Emelyianov, Simon George, Ricardo Goncalo, Barry Green, Richard Hugh-Jones, Julie Kirk, Nikos Konstantinidis, Erkcan Ozcan, Pedro Teixeira-Dias, Thorsten Wengler.

Apologies: Andrzej Misiejuk

Minutes of last face-to-face meeting

No comments.

News

Oversight Committee meeting (NK)

There was an ATLAS OsC meeting last month. Nikos reportde the status of the HLT UK project. The committee raised three main points:

1) request for clarification of our statement that, in view of latest announced CPU developments, we are confident we can meet the processing targets, given the return of the deferred funds. A detailed reply was prepared, circulated for comments, and has now been sent to the OsC.

2) request for more precise specification of dates, milestones and deliverables for the software part of the project. (To be addressed at the next OsC meeting.)

3) request for more specific project completion metrics. Namely, refer to documents details of a spec, rather than just state that "performance is according to specification". (To be addressed a the next OsC meeting.)

The next ATLAS OsC meeting will be on the 14th May, 2007.

Large Scale Tests (FW)

Tests are ongoing, with emphasis on the database configuration and access. Progress according to expectations. Currently the tests are being run on a few hundred machines. This will be scaled eventually to 1000 machines.

Technical Run (GC)

There was a serious glitch due to a power outage last Monday -- caused a loss of the neutral phase going into one of the racks, when they were brought back up after the power cut. This affected eight machines and one switch, which are now out of action; the SFIs are OK.

Progress Reports

ROBin (FW, BG):

Now have an almost finalized list of ROBins for the next (final) production: replace 16 faulty boards (7 from UK production + 9 from German production) + 30 needed for detector testbeds and new detectors. Order in preparation, with some urgency, as processors will no longer be available next year. Manufacture will be at Gebauer, in Germany.

BG: The issue of the development of a new ROBin (with PCI express interface) was raised last week at CERN. RHUL is interested in participating: similar work is already ongoing at RHUL, for the CALICE DAQ.

BG gave details on the faulty UK ROBins: not clear whether problems are due to faulty chip manufacture, or if problem has been induced by static or mishandling of the boards. Slow/inefficient communication with CEMGraft, as they are not replying to e-mails.

BG: the ROBin development team (RHUL, NIKHEF, Mannheim) met a few weeks ago at CERN to set up the system to test cards remotely (as well as locally).

ROS software (GC): porting old code to ERS (ongoing); expect new internal release (tdaq-1.0.7) before the end of the year. The next public release should be early in the new year (tdaq-1.0.8).

HLT farms and network

FW: a new test machine (dual core, 3GHz) has arrived in CERN. Testing will probably be starting next week. Will try to get one of the recently announced quad-core machines by Intel, for comparison.

RHJ reported on recent work on -SFO evaluation tests, remotely, at CERN -ELONEX machine perfromance -Disk and RAID performance: multiple stream read/write performance is still below ATLAS targets. However, tests by others do not show a similar drop when using multiple streams. The difference is not yet understood.

TW: Medium scale tests are ongoing. Regular reports at the pre-series meeting; slow down of this effort because of LST effort. Paul Bell has now switched from SCT to HLT and is participating in the Technical Run. New HLT PDRA position at Manchester, expected to start in January (interviews next week).

Trigger Configuration: L1 is essentially complete. Full functionality is there for HLT now, but need to complete the list of implemented menus. Well received in the review, valuable feedback given. Review report to come out soon. Trigger Config Tool already being used in the LSTs.

Core Software

SG: 12.0.4 - significant improvement in terms of additional functionality wrt previous release.

L2 tracking

EO has worked for the release of the code for 12.0.4. Now going over the test results from Monika and Dmitry regarding the efficiency of IDScan (namely for misaligned data; frequency of missing space points in e.g., pixel vs SCT, etc).

DE is looking at data with pile-up; first tests; some inefficiency observed (3-4% drop) in the presence of pile-up (if no pile-up, no change wrt previous results isobserved)

L2 track truth association: bug found recently; RG will be testing the fixed version soon.

Finances

No bids. Financial report at the next face-to-face meeting.

Next meeting date

Need to change date of next face-to-face meeting (previously booked for 24 Jan) due to a clash: It was agreed to have the meeting at UCL, a week later, on the 31st January.

The following face-to-face meeting was scheduled for Tuesday 24 April, 2007.

(Minutes taken by PTD)

-- NikosKonstantinidis - 29 Jan 2007