Slice Status Status Update

(Jan.5, 2005)

During the CMS week we have had a few discussions w.r.t. location and mile stones for the EMU Slice Test. I think it is fair to say that the consensus goes to setting it up at the + side. The only show stopper, which was raised during the CMS week, could be the availability of a cable rack that would keep our DAQ fibers. This week (well, as soon as I have my car back "online"), I'll walk through SX5 with Armando and look at this and possibly other issues.

Off-chamber electronics is currently available for at 3 chambers. This, and the DDU, should be marginally sufficient towards our first stepping stone which is connecting our system to the CMS DAQ by the end of March'05. Until then we would like to collect more off-chamber electronics allowing at ~6 chambers to be configured and read-out.

VME controllers have been ordered: two Dynatems at FNAL (through Giorgio) and two CAENs at CERN (via Christoph Schwick). To get us started, however, we managed to get (thanks to Vladimir, Petr and Valentin) hold of one dynatem D360.

After discussions with Oleg and Valery A. it was clear that no LV, HV or gas issues are to be expected for a slice test on YE+2.

We are still in the process of assembling the peripheral crate. Until xmas the idea was to use the new crate. I think that too many issues still surround it in order to make it and actual short-term solution. Module cooling, regulator cooling, LV powersupply as well as the fact that some testing is still ongoing make that we should rather opt for the old configuration. For that matter, Yuri K. and I went this morning to the ISR and inspected (and partially rebuild) a VME crate that was used during the beam test. We've found some problems in the power supply and the way the standard backplane was mounted that may point to the fact that this same crate was used (and partially disassembled) at the test beam. By the end of this week we hope to procure a proper VME crate, powersupply and a 3U VME backplane.

As announced by Paul earlier this week, we'll be having a slicetest software video meeting tomorrow at 10am CST (esnet ad-hoc 8275433 or 82Slice). Somewhat related to this I have had some discussions with the OSU group, Christoph Schwick (HAL), Hannes Sakulin (JAL) and Yuri K. about HALifying and JALifying our peripheral crate software. Especially, with all the upcoming activity involving peripheral crates it may be useful to see how we can benfit from using these CMS standard access libraries and make ourselves somewhat independent of the choice of VME controller.

Best regards,

Frank