The high voltage control program has two configuration files that need to be created prior to the utilization of the program. Those files are:

1. default.ini

   This is the basic configuration file. In this file there is information about the high voltage database file, which box and CW-Base need to be turned on, serial line settings and other configuration stuff. This file do not need to be edited by hand. There is a special window in the high voltage program that can be used to modify this file.

 

There are a few commands for expert operation. They are:

1. Led Ampl. entry box

   This Configures the LED pulser amplitude. Enter the value and press [Set] to set it for all the tower crates

Steve Trentalange (on site all run) e-mail: trent@physics.ucla.edu
Phone: x1038 (BNL) or (323) 610-4724 (cell)

Oleg Tsai (on site all run) e-mail: tsai@physics.ucla.edu

SMD High Voltage Operation Manual

Version 1.00
11/12/03, O.D.Tsai

Overview

Overview

This program is designed to control the high voltage of  towers PMT's (Photo Multiplier Tubes). Each tube has an independent high voltage settings. Each PMT is connect to a CW-Base that controls the high voltage for the base. The CW-Base connects to a personal computer running Windows through a RS-485 serial line. The personal computer runs a LabView program that communicates to all CW-Bases in the system to set and monitor the high voltage on each PMT. 

This page is obsolete -- please see Mac port of STAR offline software for the current status

In order of decreasing importance:

Summary of Apple's Xgrid cluster software and the steps we've taken to get it up and running at MIT.

Time	Talk	Presenter
14:00	Run VII purchase follow-up and discussion ( 00:10 ) 0 files	Jerome Lauret (BNL)
14:10	tripwire evaluation and configuration ( 00:10 ) 0 files	Mike DePhillips (BNL)
14:20	AOB ( 00:10 ) 0 files	All (All)

2006_mip-.pdf

2006_mip.txt

I plan on "Drupalizing" these pages soon, but for now here are links to Marco's slope calibration and Alex's MIP and Electron calibrations for the 2003 run:

Marco's tower slope calibration

Introduction

HPSS is software that manages petabytes of data on disk and robotic tape libraries. We will discuss in this section our observations as per the efficiency of accessing files in STAR as per a snapshot of the 2006 situation. It is clear that IO opptimizations has several components amongst which:

• Access pattern optimization (request ordering, ...)
• Optimization based on tape drive and technology capabilities
• Miscellaneous technology considerations
  (cards, interface, firmware and driver, RAID, disks, ...)
  
• HPSS disk cache optimizations
• COS and/or PVR optimization

However, several trend have already been the object of past research and we will point to some of those and compare to our situation rather than debating the obvious. Wewill try to keep a focus on measurements in our environment.

Tape drive and technology capabilities

A starting point would be to discuss the capabilities of the technologies involved and their maximum performance and limitations. In STAR, two technologies remain as per 1006/10:

• the 994B drives
• the LTO-3 drives

Access pattern optimization (request ordering, ...)

A first simple and immediate consideration is to minimize tape mount and dismount operations, causing latencies and therefore performance drops. Since we use the DataCarousel for most restore operations, let's summarize its features.

Time	Talk	Presenter
14:00	tripwire config, progress and time scale ( 00:10 ) 0 files	Mike DePhillips (BNL)
14:10	Run 6 data validation / new DB API ( 00:10 ) 0 files	Mike DePhillips
14:20	New node purchase, usage / status ( 00:10 ) 0 files	Wayne Betts (BNL)
14:30	SDAS enclave reminder (for this year) ( 00:10 ) 0 files	Jerome Lauret (BNL)
14:40	Opened discussion - BNL domain and SMS / operational needs & requirements ( 00:10 ) 0 files	All (All)
14:50	IRMIS progress ( 00:10 ) 0 files	Jiro Fujita (Creighton)
15:00	AOB ( 00:10 ) 0 files	All (All)

Runs used: 6013134 (13 Jan) - 6081062 (22 Mar)

The procedure for performing the relative calibration can be divided into 3 steps:

1. Create a histogram of the pedestal-subtracted ADC values for minimum-ionizing particles in each tower
2. Identify the working towers (those with a clearly identifiable MIP-peak)
3. Use the peak of each histogram together with the location of the tower in eta to calculate a new gain
4. Create new gain tables and rerun the data, this time looking for electrons
5. Use the electrons to establish an absolute energy scale for each eta-ring

Using Mike's code from the calibration of the 2004 data, an executable was created to run over the 62GeV CuCu data from Run 5, produce the 2400 histograms, and calculate a new gain for each tower. It was necessary to check these histograms by hand to identify the working towers. The output of the executable is available as a 200 page PDF file:

Originally posted 26 September 2005

Catalog query:
input URL="catalog:star.bnl.gov?production=P05if,tpc=1,emc=1,trgsetupname=ppProduction,filename~st_physics,filetype=daq_reco_mudst,storage=NFS" nFiles="all"

note: 3915/4240 = 92.3% of the available towers were able to be used in the calibration. Lists of bad/weird towers in the pp run are available by tower id:
bad_towers_20050914.txt
weirdtowers_20050914.txt

The relative calibration procedure for pp data is identical to the procedure we used to calibrate the barrel with CuCu data (described below). The difference between pp and CuCu lies in the electron calibration. In the pp data we were able to collect enough electrons on the west side to get an absolute calibration. On the east side we used the procedure that we had done for the west side in CuCu. We used a function that goes like 1/sin(theta) to fit the first 17 eta rings, extrapolated this function to the last three eta rings, and calculated the scale factors that we should get in that region. Here is a summary plot comparing the cucu and pp calibrations for the 2005 run:

(2005_comparison.pdf)