Meeting Notes for 20 August 2008 Telephone Number for Telecon Alan Wehmann Introduction Mihael's report Progress on CMS with Swift System Updates – Argonne LIGO Workshop (Eric) Cosmic e-Lab Workshops (Bob and Tom J.) Help Desk Request Form links to be added to e-Lab pages Tom Jordan's Analysis Issues CMS Testbeam e-Lab Upcoming Conferences SC2008 GCE08 Workshop Call for Papers Grid Workshop iLab Visioning in November in Chicago

Meeting Notes for 20 August 2008

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

Telephone Number for Telecon

We had two different telephone conferences scheduled - one set up by Eric after Tom J's standing reservation expired, and then Tom J's number that he subsequently rescheduled. We will resume using Tom J's number (it's in his "friends list" and thus a free call for him). Tom added the newer reservation to the Calendar, and Eric will delete his reservations.

For reference:
Dial-in Number: 1-712-580-1100 (Midwest)
Participant Access Code: 279742#

Information on how to schedule the call is on the ConferenceCall page, should the need arise. It's also really easy to use to schedule one-time meetings at other times, once you have set up an account.

TomJ asks if perhaps he should share his call info with someone else so that they can schedule calls on his account (and thus the same call-in parameters)?

Alan Wehmann Introduction

Alan Wehmann, a physicist at Fermilab who is in phased retirement from an almost 40 year career at Fermilab, has offered to contribute time to the ELabs project. He is starting by working with Tom Jordan by looking at the analysis code for for the cosmic ray e-Lab.

Mihael's report

Progress on CMS with Swift

Code Works; needs to be tested; it’s not hooked up to menu buttons. It uses a subset of the data from Dan K. Transferring the data with the workflow would take a lot of time so one option is to pre-stage where the analysis is done (e.g., grid nodes). For now we can have the data on one or two sites and run the analysis there or locally. Assumptions for this data may not apply for real data from LHC. Mihael needs to have an independent discussion with the Notre Dame CMS group. Tom L. needs to have the URL for testing. MIhael hopes to get Dan to use SVN to store OGRE code.

System Updates – Argonne

Bob and Eric: schedule for next week and week after. Workshops are over and school is just getting started, so there is a window where there will be minimal activity. Manual installations. We will have to test everything afterwards. Eric requests upgrade on all non-production machines 10, 11, 13, 12, 15, from least used on, and test them first. There seemed to be some confusion on what each machine's use was so Eric will update the information in the Wiki.

Action Item: Eric will update the ClusterConfiguration and ClusterOps pages, based on info from Mihael, and make these two separate pages, the first on the configuration of the cluster, the second on how to do things with the cluster. DONE

Action Item: Bob will send a news items to alert the users. DONE.

LIGO Workshop (Eric)

Six teachers attended and addressed how they might incorporate the LIGO e-Lab into their classroom. TomL and Jean Young were also there, along with Dale; Eric joined parts of the workshop by phone. One teacher said “I am already planning to share this with other teachers at my school.” Both Tom L. and John Kerr presented what they have been doing with students, which Eric thinks will help "prime the pump" better than in previous years. The participants also interacted with Jean Young on evaluation. TomL joined our call late, after Eric's report, so he will also report his own view later.

Cosmic e-Lab Workshops (Bob and Tom J.)

Server worked very well; no hiccups!! Many studies; load it up. Number of posters resulted. Several fellows supported other workshops. Many teachers get to the door of the e-Lab and need encouragement and need to know that they can’t break anything. Mihael points out that "breaking it" is a good thing, but most teachers may not understand that point. There was ome disagreement with Mihael's statement. Teachers like to feel competent, and working with something that doesn't work doesn't help with that. Bob pointed out that the inquiry-based approach is a new paradigm,where the teacher is not the expert, but the teacher and students all work together. This is not something all teachers will immediately accept or feel comfortable with, so we need to make it easy on them.

Eric feels that requiring a login inhibits people from using the site. Can we take out some of the login requirement for some pages? It’s a human interface issue. He will also discuss this with Dale and Fred for the LIGO e-Lab. We should continue to discuss.

Help Desk Request Form links to be added to e-Lab pages

Bob would like to see a link to the Help Desk Request form in the upper right (near the Login/Logout) – Logbook area; (Eric mentioned that he would also rather see the Logbook link on the menu bar, but Mihael felt that this would make it too crowded.) Bob has this request in Bugzilla. Mihael will look at this.

Action Item: Mihael will add the link for the next rollout.

Tom Jordan's Analysis Issues

Tom has fixes to cosmic/src/perl/split.pl for rollout this weekend in response to problems with data from Hawaii. It improves the code’s ability to capture and recover from timing errors caused by asynchronous rollovers of the two main timing buffers in the Cosmic data.

He will work on the Notre Dame issue with the shower study next.

CMS Testbeam e-Lab

Liz still needs link fixes from Tom L.

Upcoming Conferences

SC2008

We will reproduce last year’s; need to make reservations right away. It is in Austin, TEXAS. Tom J. is already working on Education component. Bob does not want to take the lead in taking care of this. He will go to the meetings, but asks people to watch the listserv. The graphics can be the same. We can print some more if we need to.

Action Item: Liz will look for the brochure.

Mihael suggested we should use SC2008 as a meeting place for the ELabs group.

GCE08 Workshop Call for Papers

People should look at their e-mail about this. The deadline may be an issue. It is part of SC2008.

Grid Workshop

ISGTW announcement ; Midwest Grid School – Tom feels he needs to get up to date. It is at University of Chicago and will include a session on the SWIFT component; Mihael encourages Eric and Tom to come. Eric mentioned that he would like to go to the LIGO Grid workshop at University of Milwaukee, if/when they schedule it. Mihael said that would not deal with SWIFT; Eric suggested maybe he should get Mihael there to report on SWIFT to the LIGO crowd.

iLab Visioning in November in Chicago

Liz and Marge are signed up. Other should look at this.

-- Main.LizQuigg - 25 Aug 2008
-- Main.EricMyers - 26 Aug 2008