Contact Person:
Charles F. Maguire
Creation Date: March 15, 2007 "Beware the Ides of March"
Original version, modified from
Run6 Level2 web site. Some links at this site still refer to links on the Run6 site. These links will be modified as required.
Last revision: May 26, 2007. Bringing status information up-to-date
This site will document the progress for the reconstruction of minimum bias data PRDFs (PHENIX Raw Data Files) produced in Run7 at RHIC by the PHENIX experiment. This minimum bias Run7 project is a follow-up to the Run5 and Run6 Level2 projects carried out by David Silvermyr and others at Oak Ridge in 2005 and then at Vanderbilt on the ACCRE computer farm in 2006. The Run7 Level2 data reconstruction project in 2007 is being carried out by the CCF (Computer Center France) group in PHENIX.
The procedure will be that minimum bias PRDFs are initially stored on the bufferbox disk areas in the PHENIX 1008 counting house. A small fraction (estimated currently at 10%) of these PRDFs will be automatically copied via gridFTP from the bufferboxes to disk areas on the ACCRE computer facility at Vanderbilt University. Provision has been made to have room for a buffer space of at least 50 TBytes for these PRDFs at ACCRE.
Soon after the minimum bias data PRDFs arrive at ACCRE, they will be reconstructed into nanoDSTs. It would be efficient then to analyze these nanoDSTs also at ACCRE, for example to quality assurance spectra, although this phase has not yet been decided. The nanoDSTs will be returned to RCF and stored in the HPSS.
A critical aspect of the project is that the designated fraction of minimum bias data PRDFs be completely copied to ACCRE before it becomes necessary to delete them from the bufferbox disk areas in the counting house. Similarly, we want to have the reconstruction take place as soon as possible after the files are at ACCRE, and view the analysis results in "near real time", as happened in Run6. In 2006, delay time between the PRDF file's arrival at ACCRE and its subsequent reconstruction was almost entirely due to waiting for the on-line calibration for that run to be updated into the database.
Software development for this project began on March 14, and benefitted from the re-use of the similar software developed for the Run6 project. The PHENIX CVS area for ACCRE job control scripts has been established as online/vanderbilt/run7AuAu/ . The CVS area for the ROOT production macros was established at offline/crs_macros/run7AuAu_200GeV_minbias. The main control file for PBS batch submission is called cautoRun7 whose operation is described at this link. This script runs in the /gpfs3/RUN7PRDF/prod/run7/ directory using the vmps18 node using a cron submission every half hour using the phnxreco account.
The reconstruction of the minimum bias data PRDFs and the analyses of that output was considered to be in a test mode until there is the "pro.75" build as of May 18 was certified for Run7 minimum bias data production.