Showing Off

There was one bright spot in an otherwise frustrating day. Markus Klute (left most) from CDF dropped by to see how we do monitoring for Level 3.

As most of the regular readers know, CDF and DZERO are always in competition. About 5 years ago we were upgrading our Level 3/Trigger and data aquisition system. The planned upgrade failed (closest I've personally come to a career killer). We pulled a complete U-Turn and went from a system that was 95% custom designed parts to one that was 95% off-the-shelf. It works very well, and DZERO now relies on it to collect all the data. Ron -- the fellow in the middle there -- was one of the people instrumental in pulling this U-Turn off. But, now that it works, well, we like showing it off.

CDF also went through a DAQ upgrade about 5 years ago. Their upgrade was more successful than ours: it worked. On the other hand, CDF has not run into the limitations of the system and wants one that can readout data faster. They are almost done installing a system that is based on our current DAQ. Ron is helping them out too. They hope to flip the switch sometime in the next two months.

Markus, the MIT  post-doc in charge of the CDF upgrade, dropped by today to see who we monitor the system and collect diagnostic information -- that is the last task they have. In fact, the third fellow in the picture (whose name I've forgotten!!! Sorry!) is going to have to write the monitoring code. Further making this fun is the fact that Markus got his Ph.D. on DZERO. ;-)

So, showing off the sytsem was a lot of fun. I spent the rest of the day getting my portable back into shape for work (installing missing software). Grrr.

UPDATE: Khaldoun is the name of the graduate student all the way on the right in the picture.

Comments

[adrien]

Gordon, the third fellow in the picture is khaldoun, hope he doesn't mind having his name mentioned, but you were going to, anyway, if your memory hadn't copped out on you :-)

[Gordon T Watts]

Thanks. I'm editing the post to add that.