Caltech: Drever, Whitcomb, Zweizig
     LHO: Butler, Ito, Landry, Raab, Rahkola, Savage, Schofield, Sigg
     Michigan: Riles
     Penn. State: Sutton
     Syracuse: Penn, Saulson

E8 Preparation - KR

• The E8 engineering run will be held at the Hanford site from Saturday morning June 8 at 8:00 a.m. through Monday evening June 10 at midnight. The goal is to shake down DMT monitors and shift procedures in preparation for the S1 science run starting at the end of June.

 
• All DMT monitor authors are strongly urged to attend and to come prepared to make revisions to monitors, particularly in regard to output formats and options. Unlike previous En runs, authors will be encouraged to change code during the run, in response to feedback from scientists in the control room. Ideally, authors will be working on their monitors between now and E8 and will arrive a few days early to make sure everything is ready. E8 would then serve as a real-world verification that the monitor is useful and would give scientists & operators not already familiar with it a chance to learn all of its great features. John Zweizig will be on site the Wednesday before the run to help authors with modifications. He will stay through the following Tuesday.

 
• The run is being focussed at one site this time mainly in order to bring many authors together in one place at the same time to share knowledge and coding methods. To help ensure that any improvements in shift procedures benefit both sites, scientists who normally work more often at the Livingston site are invited to participate, as are representative Livingston operators.

 
• In practice, most monitors will probably not be in a perfect state at the start of E8 and will require some revision during or immediately after the run. Authors are encouraged to plan on staying a day or so after the run to deal with such fixes. It is hoped that monitor authors will be inspired by what other authors have accomplished in making their programs useful and visible to the control room.

 
• On a related note, Peter Saulson, at Rai Weiss's request, has agreed to serve as a liaison to commissioners and operators to help improve the use of our various transient monitors in the control room. Part of that is simply educating himself and those at the sites on what already exists, but a bigger part will be evaluating where monitors need to do a better job. Peter will be at Livingston the week of April 22 to start familiarizing himself with what exists and has been encouraged to send monitor authors immediate feedback on where improvement is needed.

Status report on DMT infrastructure:
 

• General - J. Zweizig

 
• A new version of the DMT infrastructure (2.0.1) seems healthier than 2.0.0 and will soon become the production version.
• There are four major areas of development for the near & medium term:
• The monitor documentation system is being upgraded significantly, and John will provide instructions soon to authors on how to take advantage of it. An idea of how things will look can be found at http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/~jzweizig/Monitors/MonTable.html. The plan is for the same documentation to be readily accessible from the control room web pages that provide the current status of running monitors. Authors can take advantage of doc++ facilities in designing documentation.
• Alex Ivanov is working on an upgraded network data server for the sites that will allow trends produced by DMT monitors to be seen in the standard data viewer program. John will be visiting Hanford April 22-26 to try out the new system. Note by KR: this is a great development! DMT authors should take advantage of the new infrastructure and people working in the control room should learn what is available.
• John and Szabi Marka are working on a new DMT alarm system. John is creating new classes for monitors to call to turn on/off alarms, including timeout settings and an interface to EPICS. Szabi is working on an alarm summary web page that includes the facility to display specified alarm pages for monitors that have set an alarm. This infrastructure should be ready for trial by E8. John and Szabi will go over what authors need to know at the next detector characterization telecon (Friday May 3).
• An area that needs work is a GUI-driven program for setting the parameters of DMT monitors. Although some monitors have fairly static configuration files, others could benefit from an easy interface for changing parameters. A standardized approach would be desirable, one that any DMT monitor author could take advantage of. Some discussions have taken place, but no one has yet signed on. Patrick Sutton mentioned that he is developing a GUI control of his Rayleigh monitor (see below). Once that is done, he is willing to write a template version that other authors could use as a model and which could be developed into a generic tool.
• Szabi is also working on a global DMT summary page that allows display of key information from certain monitors and for a cycling display of pages from selected monitors, similar to what is commonly seen at accelerator laboratories on television monitors.

Status reports on DMT monitors:
 

• Line noise (multi-taper method) & inter-channel correlation monitors - B. Allen, A. Ottewill (Adrian reported by e-mail)
  Adrian has applied to LIGO Visitor's program to
• Finish coding work on the datacondAPI by spending 2 weeks in Caltech, hopefully at the end of April or early in May.
• Spend a number of weeks at Hanford during S1.
• If College examining duties permit, visit Hanford during E8.
 
 
• Line noise (quasi-monochromatic method) monitor - E. Daw, S. Klimenko (no update)

 
• Band-limited / seismic noise monitors - E. Daw (no update)

 
• Bilinear cross-couplings & broad-band non-Gaussianity monitor - S. Penn

Steve will be visiting Hanford the last week of April to work with Daniel on a GUI control for the Xbic monitor. Steve also plans to be at Hanford the week before E8.
 
• Lock transition and servo instability monitors - D. Chin, K. Riles (KR reporting)

Dave is working on some minor revisions to the operational  state condition code and will be working on improving the output of the ServoMon monitor. KR had reported incorrectly at a previous meeting that Dave had sent John a new version of ServoMon with html summary output. That was a misunderstanding; Dave is still working on that new version. He will get a releasable (but probably not final) version ready in the next week, in time for Peter Saulson's studies at Livingston the following week. There is nothing new to report on the LockLoss monitor.
 
• Rayleigh behavior monitor (non-Gaussianity vs frequency) - S. Finn, G. Gonzalez, P. Sutton (Patrick reporting)

The GUI control of the Rayleigh monitor is nearly done; as discussed above, this will be made into a template that other authors can follow, if desired. Patrick will arrive at Hanford a couple of days before E8 begins to do further work on this and the inspiral sensitivity monitor (next item).

Inspiral sensitivity monitor - S. Finn, K. Schlaufman, P. Sutton (Patrick reporting)
The inspiral sensitivity monitor can new send time series data to the DMT viewer. A summary html page is now under development. A new version will be provided soon to Peter Saulson for trial at Livingston. 

Power spectral transient monitor - S. Mohanty (report by e-mail)

"I have fixed some bugs I had found (before the LSC mtg.) in the monitor code. It is now running OK, i.e., it reads online data, finds triggers with t-f bounds that are consistent with the matlab code, and writes triggers into the database. I am now trying to learn how to access the database from AEI and do some post processing on it. Right now I am writing out the trigger info into an ascii file also so that I can look into the data and see what transients were found. (I have to do this in a roundabout way by copying both the data and the trigger file to AEI and using matlab for graphics since DMT is not available locally yet.) Hopefully, I can post some results soon.


You may be interested to know that I discovered some errors in the results I had shown at the LSC meeting. regarding the performance of the monitor: the Matlab spectrogram function produces an image which has negative frequencies
on the y-axis. Hence, the triggers found from my monitor were set off quite a bit, when superimposed on the spectrogram, from the visually identifiable transients. After correcting for this, the results compare well with a spectogram."
 
• Transient identification & event catalog monitors - J. Sylvestre, R. Weiss (no update)

 
• Glitch monitor - M. Ito 
  Masahiro is working on a major upgrade of his glitch monitor that will support absolute thresholds, more flexible configuration files, and latency after lock acquisition.

• Magnetic field and seismic transient monitors - R. Frey, R. Rahkola (Rauha reporting)
  Rauha has run into a problem where the earthquake monitor alarm goes off because of ADC reboots that lead to channel swapping in the DAQ system. KR suggested that the monitor not be disabled at all, since it is serving as a useful diagnostic of ADC malfunction, but that an explanatory note be added to the documentation of the monitor.

 

A.O.B

• Next  teleconference: Friday May 3 at 11:00 a.m. EDT (8:00 PDT).