My recent visit to CERN would have been sufficiently motivated by the CMS week, but I was not sure whether I should go because it was in the middle of the semester and I do not like to leave the students ‘alone’ for an entire week. Then though the performance issue in our Data Acquisition project, the Storage Manager and the File Transfer system, that had been brewing over the last months turned into an emergency, which convinced me it would be a good idea to come to CERN and have a closer look. There was also some lingering issue with the planning of our Tier-2 facility plan which I planned on resolving with people in person an CERN.
It turns out the visit was a full success. Detailed discussions with our team was very productive in realizing that the situation is stable for the proton-proton running until about the end of October when the heavy ion run would start. For the heavy ion run the current performance would result in restrictions to the data taking which might be unavoidable, but until then a number of tests and changes to the configuration might just bring us back to where we left off at the end of last year. In short: the emergency has turned into a problem that we have some time to resolve. While the time might seem long any test will have to be done while we are generally in data taking with short machine developments and technical stops.
Long dinners at Luiga Academy right next to CERN, sometimes referred to as R3, helped smooth over the somewhat tense situation. By the end of the visit we had a decent plan for tests that would on the one hand insure a safe continuation of the data taking while performing important tests to narrow down the problem and coming to a solution in the coming months.
Lothar Bauerdick was at CERN and the conversations about the Facility Plan for 2024 for the Tier-2 computing center went well.
The highlight of the week was on the other hand the update on the W mass analysis on Friday morning which contains the strong message that we are on track to make it to ICHEP 2024 …. well, this is what we hope.
