The STAR experiment

Attendees: Leve H., Dmitry A., Jérôme L., Wayne B., Gene V.B., Jeff L.

Minutes:

Databases [Dmitry]:

• Conditions collectors started (all except beam information related ones)
  • Everything running appears to be OK and status can be checked from web
  • Beam info needs cdev, provided by C-AD once their operations get going for the Run (also includes magnetic field setting; expect data around the time we turn on the STAR magnet)
    • Absence of this data means RunLog does not finalize runs and information is not migrated to Offline, but this is expected to be OK for now for anyone doing online-only tests (requested to post a note to rts-hn about this)
  • No migration issues expected, but TPC anode voltage recording practices need to be ironed out in the context of the Run 11 data (discuss with Maxim)
• Online DBs flushed
  • As expected, a few failed links and missing web pages were noted (by users too) and fixed
• Once cdev is running, will be ready for turn on / testing of FastOffline

ShiftLog [Leve]:

• As expected, excluded from and not affected by DB flush
• Manual updated for instructions on changing run status (may receive further review & changes from Jerome)

Online nodes [Wayne]:

• AFS has been stable on the newer evp machine since last Friday
  • Jeff's been using the machine (and AFS) without incident
  • Will likely switch OnlinePlots back to this machine (from evp2, the older machine) next week
    • Documentation requested for switching between these machines
• Replacement of dean at the stage of OS installation on new hardware
  • Timeline for replacement should be well before Run starts, as disk space on the new machine has been requested for online use
• Trigger commissioning is a high priority part of the request for online node resources (Wayne will contact Pibero directly)
• Nothing to report on OS upgrades

Online QA - jevp demo [Jeff]:

• Code
  • Subsystems have an xxxBuilder class (e.g. tpcBuilder, eemcBuilder, etc.) which inherits from a jevp base class for plots
  • Plot objects can have multiple histograms added to them, as well as other graphical objects like lines and circles (as long as they are of some "component" type?)
• Configuration
  • Editor allows hierarchical arrangement of plots into tabs and sub-tabs, under larger Sets (e.g. Shift, 2009, ESMD)
    • Features drag & drop for re-arrangement
  • Tabs can have collective properties for all plots underneath (such as setting all to have the same maximum)
  • Plots can have individual properties (such as log y scale)
• Running
  • One server starts up several builders as separate processes
  • Data is sent to the builders from a file or an event pool
  • Presenter runs separately to display plots
    • Similar basic look & feel to current OnlinePlots presenter
    • Clicking on a plot brings up a reference side-by-side
      • Drag & drop to add new reference, or select a different reference from panel of choices
      • Suggested: tag references with run from which they're made, and timestamp (already includes a comment)
      • Deleting references is simple, but not so simple as to be done accidentally
      • Mild concerns to be wary of reference bloat and organization as things evolve at the experiment (including collision species/energies change)
  • PDFs generated and uploaded to RunLog DB for each Set
    • Include table of contents
    • Concerns of space this will consume on the onldb server and redundancy of plots
      • Run 10 PDFs used more than half the available disk space, and it is reasonable to expect a doubling (or more) of the required space for Run 11
      • Wayne & Dmitry will assess the current storage on onldb [post-meeting statement that space may be fine; follow up next week]
      • Requirements still need to be more accurately defined
        • Will depend on what gets axed/kept from review by subsystems & trigger board
        • Would be helped by real data, but that's a bit late

Next week: demo of Offline QA for AutoQA with reference histograms [Gene]