Minutes of the T2UK face-to-face meeting
UCL, Tuesday 9th Oct., 2007
(Meeting organized by RHUL; met at UCL)
Present:
Manchester: Stefan Ask, Paul Bell, Simon Head, Jiri Masik.
RAL: John Baines, Dmitry Emelyianov, Fred Wickens, Monika Wielers.
RHUL: Antonella De Santo, Simon George, Barry Green, Pedro
Teixeira-Dias (minutes).
UCL: Mario Campanelli, Cathrin Bernius, Gordon Crone, Nikos
Konstantinidis, Erkcan Ozcan, Mark Sutton.
Apologies: None.
News
LHC schedule: there was a presentation by Lyn Evans today. He reported
on delays due to the Liquid He transport and storage, as well as on
the "plug-in modules". At the moment no changes to the schedule (first
collisions in July 2008) are foreseen.
The new TDAQ structure (TDMT: Livio Mapelli and Chris Bee; and Nick
Ellis as overall Trigger project coordinator) has now been operational
for several months. It seems to be working well.
Work packages - progress over the last 6 months and forward look
WP1: ROS hardware and software
ROBins
Fred, Barry
2 boards had soldering issues. 8 problem boards so far. Repairs
attempted on all 8 (2 last week only). 3 out of 6 with PLX repair are
now fully working and operational at CERN. Out of the 8 boards whose
PLX were removed, 3 are now OK, possibly 4. Problem not getting any
worse, no new failures of the same type recently.
Reuse of old PLX/FPGA: not clear this will work; need to re-ball the
Ball Grid Array, and
CemGraft has counselled against this.
Final German production (additional 70 boards) was finished end of
August.
Next TDAQ release tdaq-01-09 will incorporate a CRC checksum that will
be attempted on a fraction of the data, to detect any data corruption
problems in the ROBin.
ROS software
Gordon
tdaq-01-08.03 now installed in P1. Will be used in the next
commissioning run. Changed the way information is reported to IS,
towards OMD (Operational Monitoring Display). tdaq-01-08.03 also
includes the CRC checksum.
ROS operational monitoring
e.g., identify hot ROSs; OMD functionality still not what is required,
but this is expected to improve in the future. General support to
detectors, commissioning ROSs. The majority of ROSs already
commissioned with detectors: all of the calorimeters (LAR alone is
more than 50% of all ROSs).
So far with LAr have achieved 50kHz readout rate, still short of the
75kHZ (to be investigated with M5, then M6 when SCT is
installed). Tests with very high data request rates (out of the ROBin)
have been successfully achieved.
WP2: HLT farm and networks
HLT farms
Fred
No new equipment purchases in the last six months, and no plans for
immediate future. Now updating the specs in preparation for the next
round of purchases (SFIs and HLT farms). The farms are generally
running very well; demonstrated that local file servers can meet the
requirements. Determined that a single file server per rack is
sufficient to cope with all the traffic for all 30 machines in the
rack.
Grid running (Jiri): no news
Performance of new AMD quad-core machines (Fred)
News on AMD quad core performance announced (2 weeks ago); not yet
clear whether will buy from AMD (2GHz) or Intel (2.3GHz or
3GHz?). Detailed comparisons still remain to be done, until purchase
next Spring or later.
Networks
Fred
Networks have been running quite well at P1. Some issues identified
under abnormal usage/circumstances (such as when using HLT farms for
EB; switches cannot cope with high data rate). New switches still
being added to the system.
WP3: HLT software
L2 tracking (slides by Erkcan)
Fake rate (IDSCAN) reduced by a factor of approx. 3 (7% to 1.7%). In
the latest version of IDSCAN the only-one-hit-per-layer rule has been
removed, to allow hits from overlapping modules. Increased hit
multiplicity helps slightly with the z0 resolution (especially at high
pseudo-rapidity). Will try to get latest version of code into
13.0.30.2.
Timing measurements / tracking (slides by Dmitry)
Measurements with 13.0.30. Compared to 12.0.6, some significant
increase, mostly from data preparation stage (especially TRT offline
ByteStream converters).
ATLANTIS monitoring (slides by Jiri)
Fully integrated in the trigger monitoring for M4. In M5 TGCs will be
included as well. Next, will add functionality to allow changing the
type of monitored events mid-run, rather than just before the run
starts (as it is at the moment).
Antonella
Antonella asked how to best integrate physics and trigger, for more
coherent way of working and higher profile. Discussion ensued as to
how to make the UK physics and trigger communities work together more
efficiently. Trigger and Physics meetings in the UK? The UK Physics
meeting in January is a good opportunity to make improvements in this
area. Not advocating creating a new structure. John, Ricardo, Tracey
already interfacing between physics groups and trigger project.
HLT steering
Simon G
New version of steering implemented about six months ago. Implemented
improved monitoring, error reporting, and more robust
algorithms. Better support for topological triggers; new
RoI overlap
removal. Persistency/transient separation evolving, to allow 13.0.30
data to be read with future releases.
10^31 menus implemented, about 200 different trigger chains included
(cf 30 in rel 12). Work is ongoing for the 10^32 menus. Need to work
on tightening selection thresholds, prescale factors, measuring
background rates, also keeping an eye on the execution time.
Steering has been extensively and successfully tested over the summer
(including in technical runs and cosmic runs).
Trigger configuration software
Paul Bell, Simon Head
Used in the last technical run, for the cosmic slice. Teething
problems identified and ironed out. Will need to re-align the database
evolution with the algorithm integration group.
Trigger Tool is now largely a done & delivered product. A
demonstration of the
TriggerTool, in preparation for M5 will be
happening tomorrow.
Trigger software validation
Simon G on behalf of Ricardo (slides by Ricardo)
Ricardo has been mostly busy with HLT software validation in
preparation for release 13.0.30. (Also has been covering L1 sw, as
Olga left and her replacement is not yet active.) Organized a half-day
Trigger Validation Workshop at CERN, on 26 September (21
participants); workshop included tutorials, aimed at trigger slice
validation representatives and was very well received.
Ongoing work (started at the BNL workshop) on
TriggerDecisionTools,
together with Simon G over the summer.
Release Schedule
Simon G
Release 13 now; currently in final iterations of release 13.0.30.
Release 14 in February (aim for improved performance: memory usage, speed,
initialization).
Region Selector
Mark Sutton has completed the new interface of the Region Selector. It remains to
make necessary changes to the
RoIDescriptor and to migrate the algorithms to
the new interface, initially keeping the size/shape of
RoIs unchanged, so as to
validate the new version, then people to start using the new features.
Serializer (slides by Jiri)
This is a library to encode/decode the objects of
L2Result and
EFResult. It was used in the last Technical run and worked
fine. Analysis if saved data is now ongoing.
HLT presentation will include the 6 main deliverables (3 hardware + 3
software), which the
OsC wishes to tick off next Spring.
Hardware deliverables; ROBIN Performance - make reference to the ROBin
paper?
Software deliverables; use timing and memory leak plots from Jiri and
Dmitry.
Finances
Fred
Requisitions: very little spend so far this year (mostly related to ROBin
work).
Finances are sound. No requests for funds at the meeting.
Will request to roll over about £50k-60k for next year. Extra money
still needed for ROBin work.
Travel
Budget still underspent. LTA spending on the increase, but still under
control.
Next meetings
Next phone meeting: Wed 5/12/07 at 11h00 (UK time).
Next face-to-face meeting: Wed 30/1/08 from 13h00 (t.b.c.): this will be organized by UCL, but meeting at RHUL.
--
PedroTeixeiraDias - 04 Nov 2007