Software phone meeting on 26 January 2006

Present: Bruce, Florian, Gilles, Kambiz, Murrough, Norman, Paolo, Pavel, Rainer, Richard, Sten, Steve, Victor.

Status reports

Birmingham

Gilles has added a third crate to his system. After getting help from Paolo he has now configured the PMP presenter to display the histograms from CPM scans just as he wants them.

An attempt to run a CMM timing scan at Birmingham was not successful - most probably due to problems configuring the database correctly.

CERN

Murrough has been able to make some progress with ROD crate DAQ - the basics for using it to configure our system and to do multistep runs is now in place.

Steve, Murrough and Paolo had a preliminary discussion last week, while Paolo was at CERN, about starting to work with GNAM. The proposal was that Paolo develop a byte stream decoder library and a simple histogram library to test it. Detailed monitoring of the subsystems could then be based on these examples.

Heidelberg

Florian has been testing code for TileCal tests. The DAC and pedestal runs are now tied together and there is a "resource" file to set acceptance parameters for the cable test results. He has also fixed a bug that sometimes caused crashes in the post calibration.

Bruce suggested that if this development was now stable we could make an official release.

Mainz

Rainer has added code to configure the JEM via the System ACE. They are about to move to the new TDAQ release for the production testing.

QMUL

Paolo has made progress in the bytestream decoding in GNAM but still needs to implement and test histogramming the resulting Raw Data Objects. It was suggested that once this is working he should visit RAL to look at real data from the slice test system.

RAL

Norman requested that the forthcoming software workshop should include a tutorial on how to find and fix bugs in the database.

Richard has extended his CMM timing scan to work with two CPMs sending data to the CMMs.

In between slice tests, Bruce has made some ROD software changes following on from firmware changes.

He is still waiting to commit API changes to the infraL1Calo package along with the consequent modifications to a few other packages.

Stockholm

Sten reported that Torbjörn is starting to set up the TDAQ software in Stockholm.

Discussions with Calorimeters

Norman raised the subject of future discussions with the calorimeters. It was proposed to arrange such a discussion for the Wednesday after the software meetings (ie 1 February) with a small group from L1Calo meetings calorimeter experts followed by a report back to the full group.

Norman said there were two things we still dont understand, namely the operation of the full calibration and the case where we need specific parameter settings (eg a particular energy). We need to look at these in the context of the run control, run type plans and the database. This should be done in the software workshop to give some shape to the calorimeter discussions. We also need to get from the calorimeters a better understanding of how they do their calibrations.

Next meetings

The software workshop will be held at CERN from 30-31 January and the next phone meeting on Thursday 9 February.