Software phone meeting on 31 August 2006

Present: Bruce, Christian, DaveS, Damien, Florian, Kambiz, Marianne, Markus, Murrough, Paolo, Steve, Victor.

Status reports

Heidelberg

As announced on the SW mailing list, Victor has made updates to the new channelMappings package in CVS and added Doxygen documentation.

Florian has started to implement the new run types needed for ROD/ROS readout, ie a readout pointer scan and a single integrated PHOS4 scan.

Mainz

A command line FIO delay scan tool was reactivated by Markus for the JEM preproduction tests.

Some of the long standing incompatibilities between JEM simulation and firmware were fixed by Steve. However some still remain, mainly in the jet algorithm, eg when changing from 2*2 to 3*3 window size. These problems should be fed back to Stockholm (Sam/Attila).

Responsibility for the jemSim package is now taken over by Markus.

Bruce again raised the request that the JEM firmware be able (as was possible with earlier JEM versions) to send jet or energy results to either left or right CMM under software control as this had proved useful in test setups. Rainer will pass this request on to Uli.

QMUL

Paolo has been working on OHP and not on his L1Calo packages. The status of the gnamL1CaloHisto package remains that any number of HistogrammerBase subclasses can be loaded in one shared library, but only one shared library with such classes can be used at a time. Paolo understands where this limitation arises but will not have time to fix it until after the Rutherford summer school.

CERN

Marianne has nearly finished implementing all the JEM histograms suggested during recent discussions with Steve, Murrough and Christian. Some aspects await changes to the bytestreamDecoder and channelMappings. It was suggested she might look at using OHP to display the new histograms.

Murrough has added to the database code an easier way for multistep scan analysis and monitoring programs to find the value, at a given step, of the parameter being scanned.

After reports of events in the ROD readout with scan parameter settings from the previous run, Bruce has updated ttcviServices to more effectively disable triggers at the end of run.

tdaq-01-06-00

We should distribute the tarball of the tdaq-01-06-00 release as installed at Heidelberg with correct paths after checking that it is up to date with all patches. Murrough will try a test installation at RAL and also try tdaq-01-06-00 at point 1.

Channel mappings

Victor and Florian were worried that the bytestream RDOs might not return the crate, module and digital channel IDs obtained from the ROD fragment. Steve assured them this should be OK.

GNAM issues

Victor has done most of the restructuring of his code to prepare the move to GNAM, but had identified a number of issues to be resolved before this could be completed. One of these is purely his code: he still has to prepare to handle more than one PPM per crate.

The main GNAM related issue is that all histograms must be booked in advance, eg before knowing how many PPMs appear in the data (though this could be determined from the database) and more seriously before knowing which run type has been chosen. Paolo said that GnamHisto objects could be flagged as not to be published or even not to be filled. But still all histograms Victors program might want to publish would need to be booked in advance.

We can easily imagine a numbe of use cases where being able to dynamically add histograms during the run would be useful. Such a request (and any others we come up with) should be fed back to the GNAM developers via the monitoring working group.

We also discussed the requirements for comparison with reference histograms. Paolo said that OHP can show users the comparison with a set of reference histograms. For automated comparisons with error messages we would have to wait for the "smart monitoring" developments which are still at the design stage.

We proposed to have another GNAM "experts week" (around end September to mid October) where ideally we would gather people developing GNAM based monitoring or analysis at CERN. It may be hard to find a suitable date when everyone can come, but at least we should expect code to be basically working by the chosen date. Murrough will gather everyones constraints.

Next meeting

The next phone meeting will be on Thursday 14 September at 11:00 CET (10:00 GMT).