Meeting Notes for 9 July 2008 Updating Systems at Argonne Eric's Report LIGO data availability Forums and wikis Interferometes and earthquakes Tom L's Report CMS e-Lab Progess Mihael's Report Bug fixing Upgrading PostgreSQL: Translation Issue

Meeting Notes for 9 July 2008

Present: Tom L, Mihael, Eric, Liz, Bob
Absent: Dan K, Mike W., Randy, Kris, Joao, Tom J.

Updating Systems at Argonne

We will schedule the updating of the systems on the machines for the last week of August when schools are least likely to be using the e-Labs and the workshops are over. These will be done one machine at a time.

Eric's Report

LIGO data availability

Availability has stabilized. There are gaps in the data; LIGO data are being collected and being made available once a day, at 5AM PDT, not once an hour. At 5 PM one may get a data error. Eric is hoping this will change. Bluestone gets the data from Hanford. Tekoa (the machine) is supposed to be moved to MIT later this year. Eric needs to talk to the people at Hanford about getting data once an hour so it is more like real-time. It is possible we could end up getthing the data from Caltech, and get Livingston data as well.

Forums and wikis

Eric moved the QuarkNet Fellows library and the Glossary wikis, and the discussion/logbook/helpdesk forums logbooks to www13 from spy-hill. He set up a MySQL server parallel to the PostgreSQL server on data1.i2u2.org. There is a problem with bug report form – in the helpdesk forum. Does not go the help@i2u2.org. Eric is going to try to fix this. www13 does not get backed up. Eric does a backup of www13 of his stuff. Next step is to put it on www12 (test release) and eventually www18 (production release).

Note: Bob would like to see a mirror machine – a machine outside our cluster.

Interferometes and earthquakes

Tom L. noted a connection between earthquakes and interferometry. In the Hanford detector logbook (available on-line), every 12 hours, there is now a map of earthquakes that have been detected at Hanford, along with interferometry sensitivity. Probing what procedures you need to know when earthquakes take place. Click on a map and get data on when something has happened there before. Tie that data to the sensitivity of the interferometer. 3D map of this. Need to explain interferometry.

Dale has a kit/plan to make an interferometer out of a laser pointer. He has instructions on how to make one. See the Hanford web site.

Tom L's Report

CMS e-Lab Progess

Tom had a good conversation with Jill, the teacher. Grad student working with a high school student – teaching her to code and accessing data from CMS. This summer Jill is tryng out various kind of particle physics tools that we are developing in I2U2. (Test beam and Amelia). This includes Monte-Carlo data for CMS. The CMS/ATLAS people have to put the proposal together. Do they want to have one e-Lab with lots of tools? Unified format. Milestones are shared between Amelia and CMS. Randy and Dan and Tom L. are trying to understand this.

Liz: co-mingling of data from ATLAS and CMS may raise political problems.
Eric: likes both as individual labs. They are complementary approaches (statistical analysis of large datasets, versus details of individual events). ATLAS people might take more ownership of an ATLAS e-Lab rather than LHC e-Lab. Having two e-Labs is more like how particle physicists work (e.g., DØ and CDF).

Mihael's Report

Bug fixing

This is taking Mihael’s time. It will take the new IT developer a while to be up to speed.

Upgrading PostgreSQL:

Mihael is reluctant to update PostgreSQL. The current version works very well. Eric would like to update it. Will the built from source version work with an upgraded system? Mihael wants only to upgrade the system software on servers accessed by external users. Eric would like a schedule of upgrading. Upgrading is always fragile (Mihael). MCS systems maintains these. If we have root, then we should stay with stable (Bob).

August: all machines will be updated except data1 and data2 won’t be updated.

Translation Issue

Dubna wants their own portal in Russian. We need to talk about translation issues. Multi-language localization on the wiki page. The GNU mechanism for this is based on ".po" files. Spanish &#8211 is important to US education goals. Can we apply for a separate grant with this in mind?

-- Main.LizQuigg - 30 Jul 2008
-- Main.EricMyers - 30 Jul 2008