Software phone meeting on 8 June 2006

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

Status reports

Birmingham

Gilles had some problems compiling gnamL1CaloHisto package which is now fixed (see below).

Heidelberg

Victor has started an algorithm to handle the eta-phi mapping. At the moment it just handles PPMs in the central eta region. He should keep in touch with Steve for ideas about extending this to a more general mapping service. This could be discussed at the RAL meeting.

Victor has also updated the ppmMonitoring to do its analysis using the VME RDOs rather than custom data structures. At the moment he doesnt make any ROOT files from VME RDOs. There was a question as to whether in fact we want to have more ways of persistifying our data. This will be discussed again at the RAL meeting.

Florian has made a GUI for his run plan developments and will test it at CERN soon. He has had problems running RCD at Heidelberg on both homebrew (which has suffered another disk crash) and on a Concurrent. This should also be retested soon at CERN.

Mainz

Rainer said they have been making the first tests of the new JEMs with the online software. However the full test will be done at Birmingham later this month.

Meanwhile he has been working on automating the tests of the FIO between JEMs.

QMUL

Paolo has now committed the latest versions of his GNAM packages for others to try, however there are still some problems with loading more than one of his new plugin classes.

Florian remarked that he had succesfully tested GNAM with a simple library and that it would be useful to have a basic GNAM library that just dumped the events it received.

RAL

Damien has nealry completed software to test various PPM readout compression algorithms. He has been using a physics dataset provided by Alan with pile up and electronic noise but its still too quiet.

Stockholm

Marianne (now at CERN) will start looking at monitoring when Paolo sends her a "howto".

CERN

Steve recently changed bytestreamDecoder to remove now unneeded templating. This caused some unexpected knock on effects on some other packages which were quickly fixed.

Kambiz has committed some changes to ppmServices to use new features of the RemFPGA firmware for fast clearing of event buffers. It is not possible to use the old firmware with the latest ppmServices software.

Kambiz has also made some changes to the scripts. Once the new developments are stable they will be used for the next batch of TileCal cable tests foreseen for mid June.

Murrough has started some database work in two areas. One is to try building the new trigger menu as that is known to work and be used from existing CTP run controllers. The other has been to use the Python interface to COOL to start creating example folders for CPM calibration along the lines of the existing OKS structures.

Bruce remarked that the ROD will arrive soon and will also need some database developments.

Production Database

Kambiz raised the subject of the production database provided by Pavel in Heidelberg. This has not had much external use recently. Kambiz asked if people wanted intervals of validity (IOVs) added to this database, eg for history of changes to the module?

Gilles has used the DB and has no requests for new features. Rainer said that Mainz intends to use it but have been too busy to get started yet.

This subject should be discussed further at the RAL meeting.

Next TileCal Test Session

Kambiz said that it was hoped to have another session testing a batch of TileCal cables towards the end of next week (14 June). They want to use both crates, probably both connected to A side TileCal modules though. He had a couple of requests for software developments. One was to reduced the amount of data output from Florians analysis. The other was to Victor to allow histograms to be made from two crates.

Next meetings

The next phone meeting will be on Thursday 22 June at 11:00 CET (10:00 GMT).