Minutes of the SG Meeting of 08 06 2000

Present: A.Cass, M.Cattaneo, C.Gaspar, F. Harris, J.Harvey, B.Jost, P.Mato,  F.Ranjard,  I.Videau

Minutes: J.Harvey

1. Minutes of May 5 2000

The minutes of the previous meeting (html) were approved.

2. Manpower

Summer students : 3 students will arrive shortly.  1- with Eric will work on data quality checking, improve automation of production e.g. generator paramter checks, histogram analysis. He  will share Eric's office, 2- with Markus will work on C++ work in GAUDI. He will share Markus' office. 3- with Pere on project still to be defined. He will share Pere's office. PCs are already available (check memory ).
Cooperand : Will arrive in September. He will share Clara's office. He will need a PC. ACTION : Marco.
Doctoral Student : Will arrive in September, a room and desk need to be located.
There will be a Fellows committee meeting on June 27th. There are good candidates to work on DAQ projects in LHCb. 
A request has been made for a cooperand for 2001 to work on  the Controls Project.
Discussion has started to open a new post for a software engineer to work with the GAUDI team.

3. Budget

This years LHCb budget has been fixed, including the amount allocated to DAta Handling (DAH 32515).

4. Web Collaboration Database, Documents, Mailing Lists

Eric has prepared a project plan for handling the migration to centrally supported services (WORD). At the same time the opportunity will be taken to revise the structure and look and feel of the LHCb web. A small group of people will meet to review the plan in detail and to steer it to completion.

5. IT/LHCb Liaison

COCOtime review - questionnaire not yet available. Joel will be asked to prepare a memo using last year's questionnaire which will be circulated for comment.
FOCUS - the next FOCUS meeting will be this afternoon. Marco will report on this at the regular weekly Computing meeting. Florence will request that the status of ASIS is presented at the next meeting. Issues for tomorrow's meeting with IT include licences for FORTRAN compiler, status of Windows 2000 AFS client, RFIO library needs recompilation with different flag (request of 3 months ago).

6. Rountable on Projects

DAQ - engineering effort from Warsaw to work on RS confirmed. Design specification expected in 9 months. Design of RS switch expected July 27th with design review in September. Interest expressed by Lausanne EPFL to work on Event Filter Farm project. New material has been put on the DAQ web pages.
CONTROLS  - Pentium based credit card PCs expected in July. Discussion planned with D. Breton before meeting in Milano in September. Refurbished Fastbus crates with new supplies will cost 5-6 kSFR, to be compared with best price of new 9U VME crate and power supply of 10 kSFr. Possibility of using cheap PC power supplies also being investigated.
GAUDI - plans for a Programme of Work meeting  were agreed. It was decided to have online participation particularly for discussion of event data formats and conditions database items. Interactive analysis tools was  added to the final agenda.  An outline for the next software week was agreed. This will include a session on the computing model and grid activities. The Software Panel will recomend a JCOP style organisation for managing common projects between the 4 LHC experiments and IT. There will be an overal Common Project coordinator and a Steering Body comprising representatives of the managements of the various participating groups.
BRUNEL - It is difficult to pin down the people  who will participate in the BRUNEL forum for subdetector people (so far only Tracking and Muon). Aim by next software week is to have all people identified and to have the output produced by BRUNEL validated by all the SD groups.
GEANT4 - the G4 collaboration spokesman is requesting FTEs from LHCb to work in G4 working groups. It is palnned to setup a new G4 subgroup dedicated to training.
COMPUTING MODEL/GRID Frank presented a draft project plan (WORD) that he and Eric have prepared. Certain people have been identified who intend to start working with grid software (Globus) and these are based at Liverpool, RAL, Oxford and CERN. The project will evolve to include other LHCb centres in the near future starting with a public LHCb grid meeting in July.

7. AOB

The CERN/RUSSIA computing coordination meeting will be held on July 11th. Tony represents LHCb at this meeting.
The next Steering Group meeting will be on September 7th.