Meeting Notes for 3 September 2008 Evaluation Plan Travel Funds/Dates CMS Data concerns Upgrades at Argonne New Hire Update LIGO report Sept. 10th

Meeting Notes for 3 September 2008

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

Evaluation Plan

Marge reviewed the evaluation plan for the next three years. This plan will require us to collect data for Jean Young to use in her evaluation. Marge will e-mail us a copy of the section in the proposal on evaluation. We will write and pass around a document listing what statistics we should provide and pass it on to Jean for her comments. Mihael believes that we can have a web page that has all these stats displayed.

Evaluation issue: Tom brought this up at the last meeting, and several of us have been thinking about it more: What role do/did outside resources and/or outside data play in a teacher's use of the [LIGO|cosmics|CMS] e-Lab?

Recently Jean pointed out that we only have the content questions in our pretest for Cosmic. Tom L. and she will provide Liz with thse process questions to append to current ones.

Travel Funds/Dates

Getting together Oct 21st will not work; the new grant has a smaller budget for travel than the past grants. Marge does not think she can pay for Eric's going to SC2008, and Eric thinks meeting people in Chicago is better anyway.

CMS Data concerns

Last week we asked Tom L. to discover how much data the CMS experiment would be providing to the CMS e-Lab. Pat Mooney and Dan K. joined us for this discussion.

Doug Berry said:

"This is a back of the envelope calculation and the final rate cannot be determined until we do the full simulation and have the final trigger designed set in stone.

The raw Z boson production rate at low luminosity (2E30) has been simulated to be about 1Hz.

The branching ratio for Z → ee and Z → μμ is 3.4% for each process, so our maximum possible bandwidth is 0.068Hz.

The trigger efficiency is about 25% and 50% for Z → ee and Z → μμ respectively, for a total bandwidth of 0.0255Hz.

This is an upper estimate for the bandwidth because we are probably going design the trigger to exclude events with high jet multiplicity and the trigger efficiency analysis was preformed on data with possible preselection, which would artificially increase the trigger efficiency.

I am just beginning to preform the actual trigger simiulation from simulated raw collisions. So it might be a week or two before I can get you numbers that are more accurate but these should be in the ballpark."

We thought this might be about 0.8 terabyte a year. One suggestion was that If it seems we would fill our hard drives too quickly, we could open up the spigot for a while. We only need a month's worth of data. However others suggested it might be better for students to be getting the data in real time. The quality of data could change in time. Looks good if we are providing fresh data and tamp it down. Maybe we could add functionality to allow students to request a different type event. The triggers can change over time.

Now we have the storage area for this locally. Another consideration is what CMS will allocate. Probably won’t increase. If we decided on another event structure, we will probably get the same bandwidth. Ask Doug Berry to join us next time.

Tom L. was interested in providing pedalogically interesting tasks. We discussed whether students could look for Higgs. There is a decay Z → μμμμ though it is very rare. Pat Mooney – wants students to choose different triggers. What we have now is a “Beginner”. They hope to have intermediate and advanced activities. We can have code to garner other objects from data.

Should we be having three different e-Labs or everything contained in the context of one e-Lab. Testbeam Data, Monte-Carlo data, and real CMS data? Dan wants the Monte-Carlo e-Lab up and running for e-Lab testing/review referred to in the grant proposal.

The Testbeam e-Lab should go through the peer review and beta testing. Tom pointed out that the Testbeam e-Lab is somewhat like the performance study of the detector. For now we should hold off for a week or two before we start doing the peer review.

CMS and LIGO will make a timeline to finish their product development.

Upgrades at Argonne

Mihael said that it is going slower than we wanted. They are still not done with www12. He is hoping that what he learns from this getting www12 up will make the others go faster. The cert has to be configured.

New Hire Update

An offer has been extended.

LIGO report

They are making good progress on the ELabs data machine at Caltech. Gred Mendell at Hanford will be responsible for the machine. Eric will create a page in the CI wiki on requirements and configuration for the machine. [Done: LIGO Relay Server ].

Bluestone production is to be moved to the ANL cluster, but won't even try to do this until systems have been upgraded.

Sept. 10th

Need to have two separate conversations: those concerned with the evaluation/education issues and those with technical issues.

THe LHC PJ party will bring everyone here for the evaluation/educ. discussion. They will meet and call Dale.

Another discussion that needs to take place on the 10th with Tom J., Tom L., Bob, Marge, and Tom L. concerns collecting data about the detectors and Google maps.

-- Main.LizQuigg - 09 Sep 2008
-- Main.EricMyers - 09 Sep 2008