Engineering Run E11 - Prospects

KR summarized recent exchanges with Stan Whitcomb on planning for S4 and a pre-S4 engineering run E11. Stan can imagine two distinct scenarios: a 6-month S4 run starting at the end of the year, with E11 in the fall, or a 1-month S4 run in the fall followed early next year by a 6-month S5, in which case E11 could come as early as August. KR noted that holding a mini-engineering run at each observatory about a month before E11 would be desirable again.

So we could be looking at data runs as early as July. DMT authors should have that time scale in mind, not the end of the year. KR reminded everyone that some monitor authors had not availed themselves of the 6 1/2 months between S2 and S3 last year and ended up scrambling at the end to get things ready. Not all authors succeeded in that scramble. We should learn from that experience. John Zweizig reminded everyone that the DMT monitors are running continously at the sites, and authors should try to make sure their monitors are useful to operators and scientists during commissioning, not just during data runs.

DMT Software Status & Plans:

• New astrophysical figures of merit:

 
• Common infrastructure for calibrated AS_Q - Class definition and sample code (Patrick Sutton)

Patrick presented the class definition for Calibrate, the present core class used by SenseMonitor, along with some sample code extracted from SenseMonitor for calling the class. Much discussion ensued on how to simplify the interface to minimize the chances of error by other authors using a Calibrate-based class to derive new astrophysical figures of merit. Patrick will get together with John to work out a proposal for circulating to the dmt-discuss mailing list. A followup discussion will be held at the March LSC meeting.
 
• Proposed pulsar group FOM's (Keith Riles)

KR presented a proposed set of figures of merit relevant to the pulsar analysis, based on discussions within the pulsar group. Some are based on generic pulsar searching and some on known pulsar searches. Some figures of merit are spectral, others involve the time required to reach a certain sensitivity in a coherent integration. Although many FOM's would be defined and recorded for reference, only a small subset would receive prominent, routine display:
• Pulsar strain sensitivity for observation time equal to present data run
• Observation time required to reach the energy conservation upper limit on the Crab pulsar's h amplitude
• Sensitivity to ellipticity of known pulsars for an observation time equal to the present data run
• Status of DMT infrastructure:

 
• John Zweizig: Version updates, etc

John reported that DMT version 2.8.0 has been tagged. Recent changes include fixes to bugs found by Natalia in trying out the new DMTGen data simulation / evaluation code. A new linux-support tar ball (red hat 9.0) has been posted on the DMT projects web page .
 
• Status of DMT monitors under substantial development / revamping / debugging:

 
• Tim Bodiya / Keith Riles: SpecMon

KR gave a status report on SpecMon, which is a GUI-based monitor for interactively tracking band-limited RMS for arbitrary channels and bands. The bottom line is that the monitor has much better robustness than before, but is still not ready for prime time. When classes are over, undergraduate Tim Bodiya, who will be spending much of the summer at Hanford, will finish shaking the monitor down.
 
• Ken Ganezer: seis_blrms

Ken (who is taking over the seis_blrms monitor from the departed Ed Daw) has the code working now on a solaris machine at Caltech and has been reading 16-second frame files. He hasn't got the DMT viewer working yet, so relies on excel for plotting right now. He has been trying to track down the cause of red-herring glitches reported during S3 coincident with DMT network data dropouts. So far his attempts to reproduce the effect with artificial data dropouts have not succeeded. He will try looking at one or more stretches of S3 data where the hiccup was known to occur online. An undergraduate working with Ken is compiling a database of all elog entries concerning anthropogenic noise during S3. In addition, Ken will fix an incorrect label on one of the bands, a problem spotted by John Whelan during S3.


• Tim Olson: SpectrumArchiver
  No report
  
  
• Steve Penn: BicoMon and BicoViewer
  Steve reported the installation of an improved decimation low-pass filter and the addition of an operational state condition test for locked interferometer into the BicoMon background monitor. He is now turning attention to the interactive BicoViewer.
  
  
• Brian Stubbs: SuspensionMon
  Brian reported that he still finds very slow performance in his monitor when running offline, despite some recent changes to improve speed. He currently looks at 16 channels and keeps track of both raw and filtered data. KR wondered if the problem was an i/o bottleneck from reading full frames. Brian will look into it. He doesn't yet understand why there remains a start-up artifact that seems to distort monitor output for about the first 10 minutes of running. John suggested he look into applying a linear ramp to data at startup and making a filter class for that purpose, since others may want the same capability. Brian is now putting in the capability to distinguish alarms by channel and is reinstalling some trend-writing code that was temporarily disabled during S3. Finally, he is upgrading the online summary html page to show nominal output values for comparison with current values. 
  
  
• Natalia Zotov: PTMon
  Natalia has performed "major surgery" on PTMon to deal with inflexibility in the preprocessor that came with the USGS C code she uses as the underlying engine for PTMon. She has also increased buffer lengths to allow better spotting of peak SNR for a series of glitches. She has also started using John's DMTGen simulation/evaluation software (see above). 
  
  
• John Zweizig: LSCMon
  John is still having trouble getting the LSC (length-sensing & control) emulation working in order to determine better the degree of corruption in AS_Q due to bad lowest-order bytes. He is also looking into a quantification of the problem through AS_Q/DARM_CTRL transfer functions, given some residual discrepancies seen recently by Xavi in S2 data. Sergey offered to look at histograms of the beta parameter determined from LineMon during S2.

 

A.O.B.

• Fred Raab requested that the DataQual band-limited RMS and glitch-rate figures of merit be "cleaned up" with notches for instrumental lines (60 Hz & harmonics, violin modes already notched).
  
  
• Ken mentioned that he would like to write a DMT figure of merit monitor based on sensitivity to supernovae, taking into account ambient glitchiness. Patrick offered to assist in getting started on that project.
  
  
• Next meetings in Livingston (March 15-18)